Question 1

What's the difference between Log Analytics and Application Insights?

Accepted Answer

Log Analytics is a general-purpose log store and query engine for many data types (VM logs, platform logs, custom logs, security logs) using KQL. Application Insights focuses on application performance monitoring (APM) such as request rates, dependencies, exceptions, and distributed tracing. In practice, Application Insights data can be queried in Log Analytics, but Application Insights is optimized for app telemetry and tracing.

Question 2

When should I use Log Analytics?

Accepted Answer

Use it when you need centralized log collection and powerful querying across multiple resources or services—especially for incident investigation, security hunting, compliance reporting, and cross-system troubleshooting. It’s a good fit when you want to correlate signals (for example, VM performance + firewall logs + identity sign-ins) in one place using KQL.

Question 3

How much does Log Analytics cost?

Accepted Answer

Pricing is mainly based on data ingestion (GB/day) into the Log Analytics workspace and data retention beyond the included retention period. Costs can also be affected by solutions/features that generate additional data, and by exporting data. To control spend, filter noisy logs, set appropriate retention, use sampling where possible, and monitor daily ingestion by table.

Log Analytics

Definition

Real-World Example

Related Terms

Cloud Provider Equivalencies

Explore More Cloud Computing Terms