Workbooks & Dashboards

Overview

Azure Monitor Workbooks provide a flexible canvas for creating rich, interactive reports from your telemetry data. Unlike static dashboards, workbooks support parameterized queries, conditional visibility, and multiple visualization types — making them ideal for operational and business reporting.

Workbooks vs Azure Dashboards

Creating a Workbook

1. Navigate to Azure Monitor → Workbooks (or Application Insights → Workbooks)
2. Click + New
3. Add steps: text, queries, metrics, parameters, links

Query Steps

A query step runs KQL and renders results as a visualization:

requests
| where timestamp > {TimeRange:start} and timestamp < {TimeRange:end}
| summarize
    avgDuration = avg(duration),
    p95Duration = percentile(duration, 95),
    requestCount = count(),
    failureRate = countif(success == false) * 100.0 / count()
  by bin(timestamp, {TimeRange:grain})
| order by timestamp asc

Visualization Types

• Table — Raw data with sorting and filtering
• Time chart — Line/area chart over time
• Bar chart — Categorical comparisons
• Scatter — Correlation between two metrics
• Tiles / Heatmap — Summary KPIs
• Map — Geographic distribution
• Graph — Network/topology visualization

Parameters

Parameters make workbooks interactive and reusable:

Time Range Parameter

{
  "type": "time",
  "name": "TimeRange",
  "defaultValue": "Last 24 hours"
}

Use in queries: {TimeRange:start}, {TimeRange:end}, {TimeRange:grain}

Dropdown Parameter (from query)

// Parameter query — populates a dropdown
requests
| distinct name
| order by name asc

Reference in subsequent queries:

requests
| where timestamp > {TimeRange:start}
| where name == "{Endpoint}"
| summarize count() by resultCode

Resource Parameter

Lets users select which Application Insights resource to query — useful for multi-environment workbooks.

Conditional Visibility

Show or hide sections based on parameter values:

{
  "conditionalVisibility": {
    "parameterName": "ShowDetails",
    "comparison": "isEqualTo",
    "value": "Yes"
  }
}

Common Workbook Patterns

Service Health Overview

// Availability by endpoint
requests
| where timestamp > {TimeRange:start}
| summarize
    availability = countif(success == true) * 100.0 / count(),
    avgLatency = avg(duration),
    totalRequests = count()
  by name
| order by availability asc

Dependency Performance Matrix

dependencies
| where timestamp > {TimeRange:start}
| summarize
    calls = count(),
    failures = countif(success == false),
    avgDuration = avg(duration),
    p95 = percentile(duration, 95)
  by target, type
| extend failRate = round(failures * 100.0 / calls, 1)
| order by failRate desc

Error Investigation Drill-Down

Step 1 — Show error summary (table with row selection):

exceptions
| where timestamp > {TimeRange:start}
| summarize count() by type, outerMessage
| order by count_ desc

Step 2 — Show details for selected error (linked to row selection):

exceptions
| where timestamp > {TimeRange:start}
| where type == "{ErrorType}"
| project timestamp, operation_Id, details
| take 20

Sharing and Templates

Gallery Templates

Azure provides built-in workbook templates:

• Failure Analysis — Error breakdown and trends
• Performance — Response time percentiles
• Usage — User sessions and page views
• Reliability — SLA tracking

Exporting as ARM Template

# Export workbook as ARM template for IaC
az monitor app-insights workbook show \
  --resource-group myRG \
  --name "my-workbook-id" \
  --query "serializedData"

Sharing Options

• Private — Only you can see it
• Shared — Saved to the resource group, visible to anyone with access
• Gallery — Published as a template others can instantiate

Programmatic Workbook Creation (Bicep)

resource workbook 'Microsoft.Insights/workbooks@2022-04-01' = {
  name: guid('service-health-workbook')
  location: resourceGroup().location
  kind: 'shared'
  properties: {
    displayName: 'Service Health Overview'
    category: 'workbook'
    serializedData: loadTextContent('workbook-template.json')
    sourceId: appInsights.id
  }
}

Best Practices

1. Use parameters for time range — Never hardcode ago(24h) in workbook queries
2. Set appropriate grain — Match time bucket to the selected range ({TimeRange:grain})
3. Limit query results — Use take or top to prevent slow-loading workbooks
4. Use tiles for KPIs — Show key numbers (availability %, error count) at the top
5. Link workbooks to alerts — Include a workbook link in alert action group emails
6. Version control templates — Export workbook JSON and store in Git
7. Use conditional sections — Hide detail panels until the user drills down
8. Test with different time ranges — Ensure queries perform well for 7d and 30d ranges

Azure Dashboard Integration

Pin workbook visualizations to Azure Dashboards for a quick-glance view:

1. Open the workbook
2. Click the pin icon on any visualization
3. Select the target dashboard
4. The pinned tile updates automatically

Key Takeaways

• Workbooks are the richest reporting tool in Azure Monitor
• Parameters make workbooks interactive and reusable across environments
• Use drill-down patterns (summary → detail) for investigation workflows
• Export workbook templates as JSON/ARM for version control and IaC
• Combine workbooks with dashboards: workbooks for depth, dashboards for breadth
• Built-in gallery templates cover common scenarios out of the box