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Upcoming changes to JSON flattening and escaping rules for new environments

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Note

The Time Series Insights (TSI) service will no longer be supported after March 2025. Consider migrating existing TSI environments to alternative solutions as soon as possible. For more information on the deprecation and migration, visit our documentation.

Important

These changes will be applied to newly created Microsoft Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 environments only. The changes don't apply to Gen1 environments.

Your Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 environment dynamically creates your storage columns, following a particular set of naming conventions. When an event is ingested, Time Series Insights applies a set of rules to the JSON payload and property names. Changes to how JSON data is flattened and stored went into effect for new Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 environments in July 2020. This change impacts you in the following cases:

  • Your JSON payload contains nested objects.
  • Your JSON payload contains arrays.
  • You use any of the following four special characters in a JSON property name: [ \ . '
  • One or more of your Time Series (TS) ID properties are within a nested object.

If you create a new environment and one or more of these cases applies to your event payload, your data will be flattened and stored differently. The following table summarizes the changes:

Current rule New rule Example JSON Previous column name New column name
Nested JSON is flattened by using an underscore as the delineator. Nested JSON is flattened by using a period as the delineator. {"series" : { "value" : 19.338 }} series_value_double series.value_double
Special characters are not escaped. JSON property names that include the special characters . [  \ and ' are escaped using [' and ']. Within [' and '], there's additional escaping of single quotes and backslashes. A single quote will be written as \' and a backslash as \\. "Foo's Law Value": "17.139999389648" Foo's Law Value_double ['Foo\'s Law Value']_double
Arrays of primitives are stored as a string. Arrays of primitive types are stored as a dynamic type. "values": [154, 149, 147] values_string values_dynamic
Arrays of objects are always flattened, producing multiple events. If the objects within an array don't have either the TS ID or timestamp properties, the array of objects is stored whole as a dynamic type. "values": [{"foo" : 140}, {"bar" : 149}] values_foo_long | values_bar_long values_dynamic

If your TS ID and/or timestamp property is nested within an object

Any new deployments need to match the new ingestion rules. For example, if your TS ID is telemetry_tagId, you need to update any Azure Resource Manager templates or automated deploy scripts to configure telemetry.tagId as the environment TS ID. You also need this change for event source timestamps in nested JSON.

If your payload contains nested JSON or special characters and you automate authoring Time Series Model variable expressions

Update your client code that executes TypesBatchPut to match the new ingestion rules. For example, you should update a previous Time Series Expression of "value": {"tsx": "$event.series_value.Double"} to one of the following options:

  • "value": {"tsx": "$event.series.value.Double"}
  • "value": {"tsx": "$event['series']['value'].Double"}

Next steps