Azure Workbooks vs Azure Insights

Question

What is the difference between Azure Insights ( not just Application Insights) vs Azure Workbooks? Consider this diagram from the Azure Monitor page:

The doc says the larger and more complex workbooks are called insights. If I look at the screenshot, the first look tells me certain out of the box workbooks are called insights. But then:

1. there are other out of the box workbooks in this screenshot which are not categorized as Insights eg Synapse Workbooks
2. there are out of the box workbooks for Containers, VMs, and Application but they are not categorized under Insights in the Workbook page although in the left hand panel under Insights , Containers, VMs, and Application have their own dedicated Insights page respectively.

The overall pattern in Azure portal is that even for almost every service's home screen eg VMs, Storage Accounts, Cosmos etc. and not just the central Azure Monitor, you have out of the box workbooks in the Workbooks section and then a subset of those workbooks in those Workbooks section are categorized as Insights. What are the rest of the out of the box workbooks supposed to mean given they are also out of the box and have a meaning to it => insights?

Can someone please clarify?

Answer 1

Definitions, as clear as I can make them. (As always, there are vagaries which come from history, marketing speak, etc that aren't always obvious to users, sorry!)

1) "Workbooks"

a) A product within Azure, "Azure Workbooks". Users save these items, and commonly access them from a "Workbooks" menu item on various resources/tools in the portal. But all workbooks are things users explicitly saved . Azure Workbooks are Azure resources with a resource Id, which live inside a user's subscription in a resource group. These items show up as blue items with a different icon in the gallery view, at the top (not shown in your screenshot). Workbooks are linked to a specific resource , so a blue item will only appear on the resource you saved it on (and think of "Azure Monitor" as a special kind of resource). So if you create a workbook on one VM, you'll only see that blue item on that VM , not ALL VM's . ( Generally , any Azure resource that has Metrics or Logs in their menu should also have Workbooks (Though this has been a long slog across all the various teams that own resource types in the Azure to get them to enable Workbooks in their menus!))

b) Lower case "workbooks", is a "platform" within the Azure portal. there are many features/tools/report things inside of the azure portal that use the "workbooks" platform for various reasons, like to allow users to customize and save, or to make it easier for various Azure resource teams to create UX/reports without building their own custom things in the Azure portal, they just build "templates" that the workbooks platform loads and builds content for them. The workbooks platform is based on a declarative JSON format to build templates that can be consumed in various ways in the Azure portal. The platform reads those JSON templates and builds up views, runs queries, etc. (Pretty much anything an Azure team can do in workbooks the platform any user can do in Azure Workbooks themselves manually!)

2) "Templates", which are never directly edited in the portal.

Templates are used to create workbooks. Think of this exactly like MS Word: There are resume templates , which have placeholders, etc. You use a resume template to create a resume document and fill in your name, your details etc. Most users of Word have never written or edited a word template (.dotx file), but most have used a template to create a document and almost everyone has saved a document (.docx file).

a) lower case "templates" in the general case are things produced by various people / teams that are then shipped inside the Azure portal. These items appear in your screenshot as the purple items. They appear in the gallery, but there are other places (like most of the "Insights") that are showing a read only view of that template. This effectively just looks like any other view in the portal, and many users do not know or care that it is built on "workbooks" the platform ( 1b ), it just shows them data they are interested in. These templates shipped by various teams never point at specific resources, they have placeholders or parameters that let them work against any resource of that type. In this way, if there's a purple item on a virtual machine, it appears on every virtual machine .

b) "Azure Workbook Templates" are also an Azure resource that can be deployed. They'd show up in the bottom of your screenshot as orange icons. These are intended to be like 2a but deployed by your team/organization, not by any Azure Teams. Like the purple items, the orange items would show up for all resources of that type in the subscription where the Azure Workbook Template is deployed. This level of templates not taken advantage as much as could be for various reasons/limitations. They just haven't caught on like workbooks have, though we're working on that.

3) "Insights" - Technically, there's no such thing as "Azure Insights".

• There are specific branded kinds of Insights , like "Virtual Machine Insights", "Container Insights", "Network Insights", that are a kind of "products" within Azure that require special kinds of onboarding. These products may have additional requirements and have their own "hero" custom experiences that were built by specific teams in Azure that had special needs. Most of them still use workbooks (1b the platform) in some way, but not as the primary experience.

• Then there are more generic things like "Storage Account Insights" which are really just a "shortcut" to the specific workbook templates you've drawn your arrows to. These could be shipped by the Azure Workbooks team, or shipped by various resource teams who might not have the resources to build and maintain full blown Azure portal experiences like VM or Containers.

Generically, all of these "insights" are a shortcut for "here are the things the product team thinks it is most interesting to look at all together in a specific way for this resource type". Some of the product teams have added a lot of functionality in their insights implementations, some only use metrics, it really depends on the specific implementation of each individual resource type, what it does, how it works, etc.

• There's also a 3rd thing "Application Insights" that's a Product in Azure as well, but that name was used well before the generic concept of "Insights" existed, so it doesn't fit into this specific definition the same way.

But in general "Insights" is just a category there, so that every item below it wouldn't need to also say "insights" on every line and take up more space (like the word "managed" appears in the next section down, but all in a different part of the phrase in every item:|)

Also, note that not all insights appear in the left hand menu for various reasons. Some of the newer/preview ones only appear in the "Insights Hub" item in that menu. But those items might appear in that "insights" category in the template gallery. Only the insights built on the workbooks platform have templates in that category

Let me know if there's other specific things I can answer!