What is Azure Data Explorer?

• Azure Data Explorer is a fully managed, high-performance, big data analytics platform that makes it easy to analyze high volumes of data in near real time. The Azure Data Explorer toolbox gives you an end-to-end solution for data ingestion, query, visualization, and management.
• By analyzing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across time series, and by using Machine Learning, Azure Data Explorer makes it simple to extract key insights, spot patterns and trends, and create forecasting models. 

When should you use Azure Data Explorer?

Use the following questions to help decide if Azure Data Explorer is right for your use case:

• Interactive analytics: Is interactive analysis part of the solution? For example, aggregation, correlation, or anomaly detection.
• Variety, Velocity, Volume: Is your schema diverse? Do you need to ingest massive amounts of data in near real-time?
• Data organization: Do you want to analyze raw data? For example, not fully curated star schema.
• Query concurrency: Will multiple users or processes use Azure Data Explorer?
• Build vs Buy: Do you plan on customizing your data platform?

What makes Azure Data Explorer unique?

Data velocity, variety, and volume

• With Azure Data Explorer, you can ingest terabytes of data in minutes via queued ingestion or streaming ingestion. You can query petabytes of data, with results returned within milliseconds to seconds. Azure Data Explorer provides high velocity (millions of events per second), low latency (seconds), and linear scale ingestion of raw data.

User-friendly query language

• Query Azure Data Explorer with the Kusto Query Language (KQL), an open-source language initially invented by the team. The language is simple to understand and learn, and highly productive. You can use simple operators and advanced analytics. Azure Data Explorer also supports T-SQL.

Advanced analytics

Use Azure Data Explorer for time series analysis with a large set of functions including: adding and subtracting time series, filtering, regression, seasonality detection, geospatial analysis, anomaly detection, scanning, and forecasting. Time series functions are optimized for processing thousands of time series in seconds. 

Easy-to-use wizard

The ingestion wizard makes the data ingestion process easy, fast, and intuitive. The Azure Data Explorer web UI provides an intuitive and guided experience that helps you ramp-up quickly to start ingesting data, creating database tables, and mapping structures. It enables one time or a continuous ingestion from various sources and in various data formats. Table mappings and schema are auto suggested and easy to modify.

Versatile data visualization

Data visualization helps you gain important insights. Azure Data Explorer offers built-in visualization and dashboarding out of the box, with support for various charts and visualizations. It has native integration with Power BI, native connectors for Grafana, Kibana and Databricks, ODBC support for Tableau, Sisense, Qlik, and more.

Automatic ingest, process, and export

Azure Data Explorer supports server-side stored functions, continuous ingest, and continuous export to Azure Data Lake store. It also supports ingestion time-mapping transformations on the server side, update policies, and precomputed scheduled aggregates with materialized views.