Have you noticed the powerful new grid display in Analytics in Visual Studio Application Insights? It has filtering, sorting, grouping and paged display – all great for exploring big query results. And you can expand nested data such as exception stacks and custom properties. All this works on the data returned from your last query, without having to re-run it.

Sorting and grouping

Click a column head to sort your results. Click again to sort the other way, and a third time to revert to the original order. Just to make it clear, this feature sorts the results received from the portal, it does not re-run your query. If your query included the “take,” “limit” or “top” operators, you’ll still only see the set of results it returned.

If you’d like to see things sorted by more than one column, use grouping. Make sure Enable Grouping is selected in the table settings. Drag column heads into the space above the table.

Filtering

There’s a filter icon on each column head. Different conditions are available for string and numbers

Nested data structures

When you expand a row to see all its properties, you can now expand things like exception stack traces and custom dimensions (items that are otherwise displayed as long lines of JSON).

…and all the usual stuff

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, you can do all the usual things you’d expect: Select columns with the column selector button at top right, rearrange columns by dragging their headers, resize columns by dragging the boundaries. Long data is broken into pages. See the control at the bottom of each page to move between pages and set the maximum number of records per page.

As always, feel free to send us your questions or feedback by using one of the following channels, or in the comment thread below.

• Try Application Insights Analytics
• Suggest ideas and vote in Application Insights ideas
• Join the conversation at the Application Insights Community