The questions I get most often about Analytics aren’t usually about super-complicated queries or magic ML functions.

It’s usually just about how to find specific logs in an investigation.

App Insights Analytics has a really simple way to do it – search. This will search for a keyword across all your tables, across all columns.

search "Error"

If you look at the results, the first column is called $table – it is the name of the table from which the results came from.

You can combine search with a summarize, or any other filter you need:

search "Error" 
| summarize count() by bin(timestamp, 1h)
| render timechart  

It’s also possible to search in specific tables:

search "fail" in (customEvents, dependencies)

Happy searching!