Azure Log Analytics vs. Azure Insights | Generated by AI
Good question — they’re closely related, but not the same. Let’s unpack it clearly.
1. Azure Log Analytics
Azure Log Analytics is a tool/service inside Azure Monitor that lets you collect, query, and analyze logs from your cloud and on-premises resources.
- It stores logs in a Log Analytics workspace.
- You can run queries using the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to analyze data.
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It’s used for:
- Troubleshooting issues
- Investigating performance
- Monitoring security
- Creating custom dashboards and alerts
Think of Log Analytics as the data lake and query engine for all your log data in Azure.
2. Azure Insights
Azure Insights (often seen as Application Insights or Azure Monitor Insights) is part of the same monitoring ecosystem, but focuses more on application-level monitoring rather than raw logs.
There are different types of “Insights”:
- Application Insights — monitors applications (APM): performance, exceptions, dependencies, user behavior, etc.
- VM Insights, Container Insights, Network Insights — provide pre-built monitoring views for specific resource types.
All these Insights store their telemetry and metrics in Log Analytics workspaces, so they depend on Log Analytics under the hood.
3. Relationship
- Azure Insights = visualization & intelligent monitoring layer
- Log Analytics = log storage & query engine underneath
In short:
Log Analytics is where the data lives and is analyzed. Insights are how you view and interpret that data for specific resource types.
Example
If you enable Application Insights on a web app:
- It collects telemetry (requests, dependencies, traces, exceptions).
- That data is stored in a Log Analytics workspace.
- You can use Log Analytics to run KQL queries over that same data for deeper custom analysis.
Would you like me to show a simple KQL example of how Log Analytics queries Application Insights data?