How to do it...

Perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Azure portal (http://portal.azure.com) and sign in.
2. In the Azure portal, type Log Analytics in the Search resources search field and select your workspace.

3. In the Log Analytics blade for your workspace, click the Log Search button to take you to the search field:

4. In the search field, conduct a simple search by typing Perf, a simple, table-based query to return all performance data, and click Search.

Perf is a table-based query that filters the data in the Azure Log Analytics repository and returns all records from the Perf table. As can be seen in the following screenshot, the query returns hundreds of thousands of results from the data. Because the result data in the tables is categorized by fields that are organized into columns in the table, you can further search for specific data by using the data fields and filters in your query:

To better visualize how the Log Analytics data is structured, you can run the same query in the Analytics Portal. To do this, follow steps 1-4 again. Meanwhile, in the Log Search field:

1. Conduct a simple search by typing a simple, table-based query—Perf—to return all performance data and click Search.

2. Click on the Advanced Analytics link uder the log search box:

This will open the Analytics portal, in which the first 10,000 records of your query result will be displayed. Importantly, you will be able to review the results and determine, at a glance, the structure, table schema, and content of the queried table, as seen in the following screenshot:

For illustration purposes, many of the queries created in this chapter will be both constructed and visualized in the Analytics portal.