Is Azure Application Insights a time-series database?

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I was reading some on the Prometheus time-series database, on what their core model was. I've never understood what exactly a time-series database was until then. Excited enough, I started wondering about Azure Application Insights. Sure enough, Application Insights is a very powerful tool and easy to use for .NET Core devs, especially ASP.NET Core. I've used it for years and like it a lot.

I haven't found any official docs (nor un-official) that states whether Application Insights is a time-series database. From looking at the portal, it's atleast presented as a "normal" relational storage.

This brings us to my question - anyone know what kind of database Application Insights actually is?

Thanks for your help!

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azureazure-application-insights
I was working at Microsoft when AppInsights was launched and the team that worked on it was in the same building as me and we often dogfooded their stuff - things might have changed since then, but if I remember correctly it was using a then-internal and proprietary quasi-relational store that was productized as Azure Data Lake - with plenty of indexing of temporal data, but I don't believe at the time it was a true time-series database. - Dai
Application Insights includes many products. Are you talking about Logs or Metrics exploration? - ZakiMa
@ZakiMa I'm (obviously not) an expert in this field - but even if Application Insights has mutliple products on top of it, that doesnt matter for this particular question, right? I mean, if it's a time-series or not has more to do with the underlying database rather than GUI's (Logs or Metrics explorer) on top? If i'm wrong, then yes i'm talking about Logs - Jim Aho

1 Answers

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I think the reality is more complicated (disclaimer: I'm a part of Azure Monitor team) =) There are many underlying databases to power various experiences. Metrics and Logs are powered by different solutions. Recently we released Azure Data Explorer (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/). Essentially this is a backend which powers both Application Insights and Log Analytics.

Re: time-series. Azure Data Explorer stores all ingested data. Timestamp is one of columns.