Format the TimeGenerated Field Azure Log Analytics

I was recently writing a summary performance report binned by day. If you have used the summarize operator with bin you know that the TimeGenerated field has a lot of extra characters on it. So naturally my next question was how do you format the TimeGenerated Field?  I took a look at the official format_datetime() scalar function on the language reference https://docs.loganalytics.io/docs/Language-Reference/Scalar-functions/format_datetime(). This isn’t a bad reference, in fact it details all the different fields you can put in the time field.

However, all the examples use the datetime() function inside the format_time() function. This input takes a string input and make it a time.

Before format, using the query:

There is all those extra characters after the 27, this is nice to have when you want to read that, but for daily summarized data, its a bit ugly.

Now if I input the TimeGenerated field into format_datetime() using the following query:

That’s how we can use the format_datetime() function to format the TimeGenerated field for any style date you want.