Chapter 8: Data Visualization with Azure Data Explorer and Power BI

By this point, you should have a solid understanding of Azure Data Explorer (ADX), understand how to deploy ADX infrastructure, ingest data, how to query your data using KQL, and how to perform time series analysis and create forecasts. Once you understand your data, the next step is to present the findings to your key stakeholders. We can apply the concepts of data visualization using ADX and Power BI.

In this chapter, we will begin by introducing the concept of data visualization. We will discuss some of the important questions and design principles that should be taken into consideration to ensure the narrative is clear, concise, and data-driven rather than being based on bias and gut feeling. We will also discuss some of the different chart types and when to use them.

Next, we will introduce the dashboard capabilities of the Azure Data Explorer Web UI and learn how to navigate the dashboard window, how to...

Technical requirements

The code examples for this chapter can be found in the Chapter08 folder of this book's GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Scalable-Data-Analytics-with-Azure-Data-Explorer.git.

In our examples, we will use the StormEvents table in our ADX cluster, since this dataset provides a wide variety of data types that allow us to demonstrate multiple types of visualizations.

You will need a Power BI account. Power BI requires a work or school account, which means that email addresses such as outlook.com and gmail.com will not work. Azure Active Directory accounts are work accounts and, in this chapter, we will discover how to create Azure Active Directory accounts to sign up to Power BI. You will also need Windows since the examples in this chapter require the Power BI desktop application, which is currently a Windows-only application.

Introducing data visualization

Before diving into building dashboards, it is worth spending some time discussing what data visualization is and its goals. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, Introducing Azure Data Explorer, 90% of today's data is digital and we are generating quintillion bytes of data each day!

Once we have understood our data and identified traits such as trends, variations, seasonality, and anomalies and created forecasts with them, the next step is to present our findings to our audience. This is where data visualization can help. Data visualization is a method that helps facilitate your understanding of your data to your audience, who can have various backgrounds and expertise.

Designing and developing effective data visualizations is an art and requires practice. The types of charts and tiles you use can influence how your data is perceived and bad design decisions could lead to your audience interpreting the data incorrectly.

To illustrate the power...

Creating dashboards with Azure Data Explorer

In this section, we will learn how to navigate the dashboard editor, how to build basic dashboards with various charts and tiles, how to share dashboards, and how to develop dashboards with parameters that allow your audience to interact with and change parameters. As you will see later in this chapter, parameters allow us to create predefined filters that the audience can use to manipulate their view of the dashboard.

Navigating the dashboard window

At the time of writing, the Data Explorer Web UI's navigation panel contains three options called Data, Query, and Dashboards (Preview), as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.3 – The ADX Web UI's navigation panel

The first time you click on Dashboards (Preview) in ADX (https://dataexplorer.azure.com), you will see two buttons: Create new dashboard and Create sample dashboard. The Create sample dashboard button creates a dashboard...

Connecting Power BI to Azure Data Explorer

Power BI is Microsoft's enterprise business intelligence product. It allows us to build powerful reports that give deep insights into our data that we can use to make data-driven decisions.

This section is not intended to be an introduction to Power BI; I assume you are already familiar with Power BI and would like to integrate ADX with Power BI. From my experience, most non-technical personnel will not log into portals such as the Azure portal or the Data Explorer Web UI. Instead, they will prefer to use tools they are familiar with and there is a high chance they are using Power BI. This section will explain how to create reports based on your ADX data and share it with a wider audience, such as product management teams.

With that said, it is only possible to sign up to Power BI using either a school or work email address. Email addresses such as gmail.com, icloud.com, and so on are not valid. The good news is that your Azure...

Summary

In this chapter, we began by introducing the concept of data visualization and discussed some of the important questions and design principles that should be taken into consideration to ensure the narrative is clear, concise, and data-driven rather than being based on bias and gut feeling. We discussed some of the different chart types and when to use them.

Next, we introduced the dashboard capabilities of the Azure Data Explorer Web UI and learned how to navigate the dashboard window, how to create dashboards and apply the design principles discussed in the previous section, and then understood how to share dashboards and how to make dashboards interactive by creating filters, which can be used by your stakeholders.

Finally, we explained how to integrate ADX with Power BI and how to create a work account using Azure Active Directory, as well as how to connect our ADX instance to Power BI as a data source. We created a report in Power BI to display the storm event locations...

Questions

Before moving on to the next chapter, test your knowledge by answering the following questions. The answers can be found at the back of this book:

1. What is data visualization?
2. Create a dashboard in Data Explorer for our EnglishPremierLeague table and display the total number of goals scored, the goals conceded, and the number of wins for each team. Experiment and add some extra tiles.
3. What is the purpose of parameters in Data Explorer dashboards?
4. What is the difference between Import and DirectQuery when configuring the ADX connector for Power BI?
5. Try modifying the dashboard we created in the Data Explorer Web UI and update the title by editing the Markdown text.