Azure Stream Analytics Reviews

The product is used just for the extraction, transforming, and loading of the data to the data warehouse.

It is quite simple and straightforward. The product is very user-friendly.

We like that it's using the Azure platform. We can use the old Azure functionality also. We prefer to use the Azure environment. It's something the client uses. 

The analytics and reporting features are okay.

It's scalable as a cloud product.

The solution is stable. 

I'm not sure if there are any areas that are lacking

The initial setup is complex. It should be easier for new users who may not have too much Azure experience. 

I've only used the solution for six months. 

I find the product to be quite stable now. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

This solution is on the cloud and, therefore, can scale quite well. It can meet a company's needs if the organization needs to expand. 

I don't recall ever having any interaction with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

It is not a straightforward setup. It is pretty complex. That said, you can find answers to help you set it up by Googling aspects of the product. If your team is familiar with Azure, it might be a bit easier. It they are not, they will find it difficult. 

We'd like the setup to be simpler in the future if possible. 

I'd rate the solution three out of five in terms of ease of deployment. 

The pricing is on the client's side. I can't speak to the exact cost of the product.

I'm an end-user.

Overall, I've been satisfied with the product. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use this solution to access vulnerabilities and realtime issues that we have in Windows and Linux and for diagnostic analyzation we wanted to do for our middleware product. We have multiple data ingestion types. 

Our team also analyze the data using data visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau. Our main task is to get diagnostic metrics from the products that we are using. Based on the metrics, we send an alert if any product has run out of space. For audit purposes, we create dashboards for management and compliance.

The integrations for this solution are easy to use and there is flexibility in integrating the tool with Azure Stream Analytics.

We would like to have centralized platform altogether since we have different kind of options for data ingestion. Sometimes it gets difficult to manage different platforms. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

They have detailed help documentation which is very useful. When we have contacted support, they have responded in a timely manner. 

I would rate them a four and a half out of five. 

I have also worked with Apache Airflow. We choose to use Azure Stream Analytics because we wanted to access the realtime compliancy of our product. 

If your application crashes, you can incur a data loss. We wanted to check proactively so that our system is maintained and fixed soon after that crash happens. We wanted to assess the utilization of the system and create dashboards in order to visualize those compliancy checks.

The initial setup is straightforward. It takes one or two minutes. 

There are different tiers based on retention policies. There are four tiers. The pricing varies based on steaming units and tiers. The standard pricing is $10/hour. 

In order to use this solution, one should have a proper understanding of Azure fundamentals and what kind of different data storage solutions they provide. In order to have the solution working correctly, you need data ingestion, data delivery and a data destination. 

It has features and functionality to integrate with all the tools that are available in the market, not only Azure solutions.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case involves using the app centre to retrieve lifeline data. However, the lifeline is not retrievable from the app centre due to recent changes, so we get it from Azure.

The life cycle, report management and crash management features are great. 

The product could be improved by providing more detailed analytics. For example, a graph to identify the past, present and current users. Additionally, UI and UX testing could be supported on this solution.

We have been using this solution for approximately 3 years on-premises.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We can add users when needed. Over 50 employees, including developers and QA managers use this product in our company.

We do not have any experience with customer service and support.

I cannot comment on the initial setup process because my manager set it up.

I am unsure of what the licensing costs are for this solution.

I rate this solution a six out of ten because we do not use it very often. I believe this solution has a good user interface but the solution could be improved by providing better graphics and including support for UI and UX testing.

I like all the connected ecosystems of Microsoft, it is really good with other BI tools that are easy to connect. The stream analytics are good and it is a dependable platform.

I would like to have a contact individual at Microsoft and the price is high.

I have used Azure Stream Analytics for the past year and a half.

Azure Stream Analytics is very scalable.

When it comes to technical support it is currently reaching out to community forums. I still have not seen any kind of contact person that we can call or schedule meetings with and then just ask questions. I guess that is fine because there would be millions of people trying to reach out for calls and schedule meetings. The community forum is all right. It is helpful enough. I have been using a lot of other Microsoft tools like Power BI, but I have had questions and I have put them up on the community forums and I have received good replies.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation is really helpful. It would be nice to have a support system in terms of contacts from Microsoft.

The current price is substantial.

It is a good enough choice because it is already on an established platform. The stability is very high. If there is a plan for scaling up, then it is a really good solution. I think scaling up, is one of the best items being offered. However, you need to keep in mind the costs of this robust platform. I would rate Azure Stream Analytics an eight out of ten.

We mainly use this product for real-time data injection and reporting purposes.

We find the query editor feature of this solution extremely valuable for our business.

Also, the multiple window types that are available in this solution, are extremely helpful.

The solution doesn't handle large data packets very efficiently, which could be improved upon.

We would also like more variation in the output types that this solution can produce.

We have been using this solution for three or four years.

The stability of this solution was problematic initially, but it has improved as later versions have been released, and is now very good.

We have found this product to be easily scalable.

The initial setup of this solution is very easy, and the deployment takes place instantly.

The licensing for this product is payable on a 'pay as you go' basis.  This means that the cost is only based on data volume, and the frequency that the solution is used.

This solution is easy to use and has good fault tolerance, so I would recommend it to other organizations.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a lot of Internet-of-Things stream data from various machines and IoT edge devices. We stream the data and use it for future data analytics, like machine learning or predictive analytics, so we need some dashboarding done on a Power BI report. And to do that, we have to process this vast telemetry stream data, and that's why we use Azure Stream Analytics.

I like the way the UI looks, and the real-time analytics service is aligned to this. That can be helpful if I have to use this on a production service. So this particular Azure Stream Analytics absolutely fits into that. Also, using it requires very few clicks. The UI is set up so that I don't need to spend much time on this. The way that Stream Analytics manages workloads is also good.

Sometimes when we connect Power BI, there is a delay or it throws up some errors, so we're not sure. We try to resolve it on an issue-by-issue basis. For some reason, Microsoft Power BI and Azure Stream Analytics have connection issues, but I can't say what the problem is at a product level. 

I've been using Azure Stream Analytics for about a year and a half.

At this point, it's too early to say whether Stream Analytics is stable. I'm not sure how stable it will be going forward. So far, I haven't had any issues.

We have internal Azure tech support that takes care of this, so we haven't had a need to go outside and contact Microsoft.

The documentation is clear, so we could follow it and set Stream Analytics up. In some of the new areas of the software, you require some hands-on help and some support, but for any internal deployment, we have an Azure support team. They help us with that, so it's not a challenge. 

From a pricing perspective, I don't have a clear understanding of how the streaming units are built. It takes me a long time when a price report comes in at the end of the day. I spend a lot of time on this. The way the reports break down the charges is very confusing. So that is something that has to be improved. There is a clear, concise reporting structure for other Azure services — the full subscription, Azure Public Cloud service, etc.—but the streaming unit billing part of Stream Analytics confuses me all the time.

Nevertheless, the features are decent, so I continue to use it. Still, it takes me a lot of time when I have to approve specific invoices at the end of the month. But overall, the price is fair because it charges per streaming unit. The price is reasonable. It is what you would expect, given the kinds of features it has. 

I rate Azure Stream Analytics eight out of 10. It's hard to fully evaluate a product after just one and a half years, so from that perspective, I say 8. Everything has some room for improvement. If my manager asks me to rate myself, I probably wouldn't say a perfect 10. If you tell me that Stream Analytics is done and there won't be any updates in the future then I can let you know if it's a 10. This is a great product that works better than most of its competitors. If someone is using Event Hub, they should go with Azure Stream Analytics instead. Stream Analytics is more cost-effective than AWS Kinesis. Both are excellent products, but I am more comfortable with this in terms of the features and the improved ROI. And if you're working IoT, this is the solution to use. 

We were doing some level of stream data processing, so we had some use cases which were related to IoT. We had some IoT devices getting data in from other IoT devices and Azure Streaming Analytics has a special streaming analytics offering for IoT devices. Basically it was used for that. 

I basically use two features that are useful. One is Azure Event Hubs, and that is used in conjunction with Azure Streaming Analytics. One is the broker and one is the processing engine. With the processing engine, the SQL way of dealing with things, with streams, is what I like, compared to other solutions, which are more like Scala or Spark-based, where you need to know the language. This was comparatively easy to use with its ability to write SQL on streams.

Technical support is pretty helpful. 

It's my understanding that the setup is pretty straightforward.

With Azure specifically, the drawback is it is a very Azure-specific product. You can't connect it to external things out of Azure. For example, Spark or Databricks can be used in any cloud and can be used in AWS. This product doesn't work that way and is very Azure-specific. It's not a hybrid solution and it's not a cloud-agnostic solution, where you put it on other clouds, et cetera. 

We had some connections which we wanted to make with AWS, which we couldn't do with this. We had to use something else for that.

Early in the process, we had some issues with stability.

You cannot do joins on streams of data. For example, one stream joining with another stream. Real-time to real-time joins, you're not able to do that. You can only join your stream with static data from your Azure storage. 

I've used the solution for one and a half to two years.

There were some issues with the IoT jobs when streaming Azure Streaming Analytics, which are high proof now. That said, earlier, we used to have a lot of issues with the erratic behavior of jobs. If data is not in the way they expect it, if they are not modeled correctly, then the jobs tend to break or fail quite a lot. That was one issue we had.

We've been in touch with technical support. There was a time when jobs failed a lot and we couldn't understand the reason. When we talked to the spec tech support, they've looked into our data and told us that it's not exactly modeled as how Azure Stream Analytics needs it. That wasn't very clear when we got it. 

They were helpful. There were issues which they handled, which they told us about. The communication was great.

We had the support package included.

I'm now an analyst, so I don't use the products per se, however, prior to this, I have used Azure Streaming Analytics quite a lot. Currently, I'm working a bit on Databricks Spark Streaming. These two are, I would say, what I have used personally.

The product was set up before I started out, however, what I can say, having set up some things personally, is it is comparatively straightforward and the Microsoft support on that is comparatively good.

In terms of pricing, you can't compare it to open source solutions. It would be higher compared to open source, of course, however, with the support and everything you're getting, I would say the price, in general, is fair. 

I have seen AWS as well and can compare it to that and I would say it is fair. The problem is it is not exactly dynamic or serverless, with how the way things are in the cloud. Therefore, it is not completely utilized. You have to set up things beforehand with some level of capability and capacity beforehand. In regards to the price, it's not too high and also not too low.

Their pricing is not exactly serverless. It's per hour. A lot of others are moving towards pricing based on the amount of data you pull. Streaming Analytics charges per hour, and in that sense, you need to set up the capacity by trial and error, literally. 

I'm comparing the Azure Stream Analytics, AWS Kinesis, GCP Pub/Sub, and Dataflow. So I'm currently in the process of writing that research.

If you are in the Azure world completely, and you're using the Microsoft stack completely, and you do not have the need to go in any other cloud, then it makes sense to use this solution as it integrates very well within the Azure ecosystem. 

For IoT use cases, if you want to do real-time dashboarding with Power BI, it's great. Those kinds of things are where it has its niche. However, if you want a cloud-agnostic kind of solution, where you do not want to be stuck with just Microsoft, then there are other solutions out there such as Confluent, Kafka, Spark Streaming with Databricks, et cetera. You'll get the flexibility you need using any of those platforms.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. We had some issues with the jobs not behaving properly. They promise a lot, however, sometimes that doesn't happen and we realized that later. Some things under the hood, we couldn't really understand and we needed to get in touch with support. Those kinds of issues are where I would say it needs a bit of improvement, and maybe that's why I cut off two or three points.

The company I'm working for is basically one of the biggest companies in the entire Gulf region, including Dubai, Qatar, and Oman. Our core domain is providing logistics. They have different warehouses across the country, and we use it to track the movement of forklifts and people working at the warehouses. 

The main thing we are focusing on right now is accident avoidance. For example, one forklift is coming through one aisle, and another person is trying to enter the same aisle. We provide a solution that can track the person and forklift in real-time. 

We're also using it to solve many business problems one by one. Stream Analytics plays a major role in streaming all these huge datasets because we have warehouses spread across the country. It's able to handle millions and millions of events in a few seconds.

If we're not using Stream Analytics, how can we track the real-time? From the end user's perspective, Stream Analytics forms the main backbone for the entire pipeline and all the technologies.

The company can see the real-time location and track everything, just because of Stream Analytics. Without Azure Stream Analytics, we can't do any real-time tracking. We can use other messaging systems like SQL, but when it comes to scaling, collecting, getting a lot of events, recalling it, find out where it's used, Stream Analytics is better. You might have to collect from millions and millions of services and devices and beacons. All of that would be pushing the data into the Stream Analytics. 

I like the IoT part. We have mostly used Azure Stream Analytics services for it. This is the most valuable part because this is using the streaming service. It's valuable because there's no other way for us to handle it. 

It has the support of Azure storage, long storage, and access data. It has support from the SQL server. Azure also supports added access to data because we need the data from static data and dynamic data to represent them, and that's not going to change very frequently.

When we are getting the warehouse's location through this stream analytics, we have to merge some information from our static database, and finally, we have to show it all within a dashboard or something on the map.

Without the streaming analytics part, I don't think it's possible to handle it. We can use some other messaging system, but we might have some scaling issues and among others too. I know that Stream Analytics is fantastic in that we don't have to worry about any other activities. We can further scale it too. We can go for the upgraded service if needed, based on our traffic and the number of data we have been receiving.

Natively, I found it beneficial, and the integration was smooth. We're already using some other Microsoft technology packs, so it's easy to integrate them all.

As the Stream input and output enables very smooth integration with other cloud services, for example, Azure Cloud Concepts, or Cosmos DB, with minimum coding, and with the minimum level of queries, we can directly output all these outputs and push the normal data for historical data storage.

The collection and analysis of historical data could be better. We use historical data and an assimilating algorithm to give us insights into the entire business process. 

We can collect all the historical data periodically to get insights into current business trends. For example, which area is getting emptied most of the time or which area is getting underutilized, and so on. 

I've been working with Azure Stream Analytics for about two years.

We don't have to worry about scalability. It's in the cloud and can have millions and millions of things connected. The software part is easy to scale. You just have to add all the hardware. For the web application, the hosting part can be scaled. We don't have to worry about the desktop as the solution is deployed in the cloud. The scalability is based on our choices. It's not like it's manually hosted in private, and we have to scale it vertically.

Our infrastructure team has the flexibility to call the Microsoft guys to look into the matter if there is something wrong on their part.

The initial setup was very complex because of the hardware. We had to spend almost an entire day just to put the hardware part in the right places, following some best practices. 

It took us more than one and a half years, and we're still left with some deployments to do. We initially tested it in a few small areas, and then we expanded it to cover the entire area.

I found it a little challenging, we struggled, and we did it. We're still doing a lot of stuff for the elite features and other deployments. We follow the deployment strategy, and it's almost automated. We're trying to add a few features and deploying them. The final stage of deployment is where the rest of the entire process is done through continuous integration.

It requires maintenance in terms of hardware and the software part. I don't think any solution is totally bug-free. We generate service requests all the time, and they are fixing it.

The IoT hardware requires more maintenance because we know we have limited battery life, and we have to check all the devices. We need to keep checking those things, and we have automated that. But it still needs to be manually reconnected to the battery.

We have a team of people supporting this project. We have about ten members, some of whom were core developers. Four or five developers developed the cloud part. Two hardware engineers were responsible for all these deployments in the warehouse.

I would advise potential users to properly plan and structure their static data and the reference data before putting it into the Stream Analytics.  

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Azure Stream Analytics an eight.