Hi folks!
Has anyone here been creating reports using DirectQuery from Log Analytics data, and found that their reports started breaking recently?
This is kind of a niche question, but, some background:
If a company has, for example, a web app hosted on Azure infrastructure, they can have that webapp write trace logs to Azure Monitor, which is an Azure offering for storing logging data. There's a service within Azure called Log Analytics that allows users to run custom Kusto queries against that Azure Monitor data
Historically getting Power BI to talk to Log Analytics with DirectQuery has been fraught. Once upon a time, there was a native connector, but it was deprecated in 2019. In the years since a few different official mechanisms to connect to LA natively have come and gone, but all of them supported only Import connections to LA data, when the use case I'm interested in requires DirectQuery.
For a few years, there has been an unsupported option that talks to Log Analytics via Azure Data Explorer -- every Log Analytics instance seems to have an ADE instance baked in under the hood, and with some massaging you can convince PBI to talk to it. The only documentation for this workaround approach was in a blog post by John White (archive link because his blog appears to have gone offline recently, sadly). If you read the comments of the blog post, you'll see that the workaround would occasionally break and require additional steps. The last approach that worked for us was in John's comment from May 18, 2021.
That approach involves using the Azure Data Explorer (Kusto) connector, connecting to an actual Azure Data Explorer instance -- any ADE instance, it doesn't matter, so long as it isn't the ADE instance attached to a Log Analytics instance. You then open the advanced query editor in the modeling view, and tweak the query that generated, and modify a URL in the query so that it points to the ADE instance underlying your Log Analytics data.
I have a pretty simple report that connects to Log Analytics over DirectQuery using this approach. There's no transformations on the data once it's in PBI and no RLS -- the raw data just gets loaded into a table and some slicers are attached to it, and that's the report. After not touching it for months, it started failing the past few weeks with strange errors. I've tried creating a new report with LA data in the same manner to rule out some issue with the model, and still ran into failures.
Mainly I'm wondering:
Has anyone else tried creating a report that talks to Log Analytics/Azure Monitor over DQ?
Have you found that your reports started breaking recently?
Have any workarounds worked for you recently?
Also just adding some extra notes here:
Note that this link refers to configuring Power BI Service to write logs to Azure Monitor so that PBI Service workspace administrators can monitor their PBI workspaces. I'm interested in moving data in the opposite direction (from Log Analytics to PBI)
This link refers to an option that appears to no longer exist in Azure Monitor (those buttons in the dropdowns in the screenshots for "Exporting to Power BI" or "Export as M Query" no longer exist, but when they did exist, they created a
This content pack for creating reports from App Insights data is from 2015, and only performs an Import rather than a DirectQuery connection
