Provisioning a Log Analytics Workspace

1. Start Locally

Firstly, we need to launch Locally which we can do from a terminal by running:

Once Locally has started, the Locally Dashboard will open automatically:

2. Create a Resource Group

Next we can create the Resource Group:

There's two things to note here:

1. The Azure CLI supports Automatic Configuration, meaning that it can automatically be configured to work against Locally just by prefixing commands with locally run.
2. Locally intentionally uses a different set of locations to Azure as a safety precaution, so that you can be confident you're deploying against Locally rather than regular Azure. You can also configure Locally to use the Azure locations too, but you'll want to be extra sure that you're prefixing commands with locally run when you do.

3. Create the Workspace

With the Resource Group in place, we can create the workspace:

{
  "customerId": "92f28e2b-01b6-44ba-9468-c82cedeabb96",
  "name": "sample-logs",
  "retention": 30,
  "sku": "PerGB2018"
}

Two things worth knowing about that response:

1. customerId is the workspace ID - the value agents and diagnostic settings use to identify where to send data. It's generated for you, so it's the thing to capture if you're wiring something up.
2. retention and sku come back with the same defaults Azure applies - 30 days on PerGB2018 - rather than being blank.

We can read the workspace ID back at any point:

And list the workspaces in the Resource Group:

We can see the Log Analytics workspace in the Locally Dashboard too:

4. Tidy up

Finally, we can tidy up. To remove the Resource Group and everything within it:

There's nothing billable to clean up, since everything ran on your machine, but it's still worth checking your teardown scripts work here before you run them against Azure.

Doing this with other tooling

Whilst this guide used the Azure CLI, Log Analytics works the same way through any of the tooling that Locally supports - a Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces resource in HashiCorp Terraform or OpenTofu, Pulumi, Bicep or an ARM Template all provision against Locally in the same way, with only the location changed.

Next steps

To send logs to the workspace and query them, see the Log Analytics Emulator. Diagnostic Settings shows how to route a resource's logs into a workspace like this one.

Should you encounter any issues, please take a look at the troubleshooting section.