Set up Grafana-Synapse

Grafana lets you build custom dashboards to visualize data. In this section we explain how you set up Grafana with Azure Synapse as the data source (via Microsoft SQL Server).

Prerequisites: Azure Parquet data lake

  1. Set up Azure Parquet data lake [~10 min]

Note

The above steps are required before proceeding


Set up Grafana and add Synapse data source

  1. Make sure you have completed the prerequisites above
  2. Set up a Grafana Cloud starter account (100% free) and login
  3. In Grafana go to ‘Connections/Data sources/Add new data source’
  4. Select Microsoft SQL Server as the data source[1]
  5. Ensure ‘Name’ is Microsoft SQL Server
  6. In ‘Host’ use your Synapse ‘Serverless SQL endpoint’
  7. As ‘Database’ use your Synapse database name (e.g. database1)[2]
  8. In ‘Authentication’ use SQL Server Authentication
  9. Authenticate with user sqladminuser and your SQL admin password[3]
  10. Set the ‘Min time interval’ to 1ms and click ‘Save & test’

Note

The data source name must be Microsoft SQL Server for our template dashboards to work

Deploy your first dashboard

Grafana-Synapse dashboard template
  1. Download our dynamic-dashboard-synapse template
  2. Go to ‘Dashboards/New/Import’, upload the updated template and click ‘Load’
  3. Verify that your data is loaded in the dashboard as expected[4]

You are now ready to customize your dashboard.

[1]There is no Azure Synapse data source in Grafana, hence we use Microsoft SQL Server as the data source instead
[2]This was shown as part of the Synapse Terraform deployment output. If you do not have it, open your synapse-map-tables-<id> Container App Job via the console and go to Settings/Containers and click ‘synapse-map-tables’. Under ‘Environment variables/SYNAPSE_DATABASE’ you can find the database name
[3]This was shown as part of the Synapse Terraform deployment output. If you do not have it, open your synapse-map-tables-<id> Container App Job via the console and go to Settings/Secrets/synapse-password to find it
[4]You may need to change the time period via the upper-right menu to navigate to your data