Time Series Insights

Azure Time Series Insights ingests and stores large-scale event data streams (on the order of hundreds of millions of daily events) and provides tools to analyze and visualize the data.

The service is being retired on Mar. 31, 2025, in favor of Azure Data Explorer.

Service Overview

Time Series Insights aims to simplify analyzing event streams, like those arriving from IoT devices or applications such as factory floor devices or security cameras. The service connects to Azure IoT Hub and Azure Event Hubs (both of which are event ingestion services) instances. It provides a dashboard of visualization tools (such as filtering and sorting controls, line charts, and heat maps) for exploring the data in near real time as it arrives. Time Series Insights can be configured quickly to ingest and display data without writing code. REST APIs are available to query data stored by the service for custom solutions that bypass the standard dashboard.

Time Series Insights offers less advanced analytics capabilities than Azure Stream Analytics, but Time Series Insights requires less effort to implement. For example, Stream Analytics uses a SQL-like query language to work with data, does not offer a prebuilt dashboard, and data visualization requires an additional solution such as Power BI.