New ADX Version Deployment Notification

Being a managed PaaS Service, new versions of Azure Data Explorer are pushed out regularly to your cluster. Have you ever wondered or needed to know when this maintenance is happening? Well we recently introduced this capability via the Azure Activity Log!

Cluster Version Deployment

You will now see an event under your cluster activity log with an Operation Name of “Cluster version deployment”

This event will be logged anytime we deploy a new version of ADX to your cluster. Within this message you have key information about the deployment such as Start Time, End Time, and the Duration.

Utilizing this Information

You can utilize this information directly from the Azure Activity Log but collecting the data in Azure Monitor Logs provides the most flexibility. It’s easy to enable Azure Activity log collection into your Azure Monitor Logs. Just follow the below article.

Azure activity log - Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn

Once the data is in Azure Monitor Logs we can easily parse the record using the Kusto Query Language.

AzureActivity

| where OperationName == 'Cluster version deployment'

| project Cluster=Resource,StartTime=todatetime(todynamic(Properties).StartTime), EndTime=todatetime(todynamic(Properties).EndTime), Duration=totimespan(todynamic(Properties).Duration)

The results of the above query would look something like this:

Now that we have the data in Log Analytics and a query to parse the information we can setup alerts via Azure Monitor or visualize it using tools such as Azure Workbooks, ADX Dashboards, or Grafana.

Conclusion

With the introduction of the “Cluster version deployment” Operation in Azure Activity logs we are giving every ADX cluster owner the ability to see each time a new ADX version is deployed along with how long each deployment took to complete. You can utilize Azure Activity Logs directly or Azure Monitor Logs to analyze these events.

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