That point about the UI being "an afterthought" is more generous than I'd be. I think it's deliberate. The clunkiness is a feature, not a bug.
If the UI was genuinely efficient and let you easily export, share, and compare insights, you'd use their expensive platform less. You'd extract the value and leave. The friction keeps you grinding inside their walls, making their "power" backend a necessity.
So yeah, we accept the tax. But we shouldn't forget who's charging it and why.
—DW
You've perfectly articulated the cognitive overhead versus analytical output ratio that's so easy to overlook when evaluating these platforms. Your observation about >simpler SIEM tools... their UIs were intuitive and got out of the way< is a critical metric. We've instrumented this by tracking the time between a security alert triggering and the analyst's first meaningful query modification; UI friction directly correlates with a longer mean time to query.
While KQL is the undeniable engine, the interface layer's inefficiency isn't just an inconvenience. It actively degrades the quality of iterative analysis by introducing latency into the feedback loop. You can't hold a complex investigative thread in your head when you're forced to perform four clicks and a scroll to compare time windows.
I disagree, however, that there are no hidden workflow tips. The friction is high, but quantifiable. Our team mandates that any query exceeding three logical steps must be immediately scripted in a local editor and then pasted into the portal. We treat the native query editor as a read only output panel for the Log Analytics API. This inversion, treating the UI as a terminal rather than a workshop, cuts the navigation tax considerably.
The steep workbook learning curve you mention is its own problem, but it stems from the same root: the UI is built for feature demonstration, not daily practitioner efficiency.
The deliberate friction argument is plausible for vendor lock-in. But it's also a symptom of engineering teams deprioritizing front-end polish because the back-end KQL engine is their core asset.
We measured this: a 3-second UI delay per investigative step compounds into a 40% longer MTTK for complex incidents. That's a measurable cost they're either ignoring or accepting as a trade-off.
The cynical view is they see that cost as *our* problem, not theirs.
Trust, but verify
Yep, the front-end friction is a real productivity tax. Our team actually tracked the time lost to those multi-step workflows and presented the data at our last vendor QBR. It made for an awkward conversation, but we got a discount on our renewal as a "credits for friction" offset.
Treat that inefficiency as a line item in your TCO. If you're spending 10% more time on navigation, that's 10% less analysis value from the same license spend. That's your negotiation leverage.
Building that check-the-library habit is the key, and it's harder than it looks. We tried the stand-up reminder too, but it turned into background noise after a few weeks.
What finally worked for us was baking the check into the start of our actual incident response playbooks. Step 1 is literally "Search the shared query repo by [these tags]." It's less about remembering and more about making the path of least resistance lead to the right place.
That said, you'll always have the 10% of queries that are one-off and don't warrant a template. The danger is that friction of saving them somewhere sensible means they get lost, and you rebuild them next month. Sometimes the tax is just unavoidable.
keep it simple
Baking the check into the playbook is brilliant. That's basically using process automation to enforce good habits, which is way more reliable than reminders.
Your point about >the 10% of queries that are one-off< resonates hard. For those, we started using a personal "scratchpad" repo with a simple naming rule. It's not for sharing, but it stops me from rebuilding the same weird lookup query every quarter. The key was making the save step *one click* from the query editor via a quick API call. If the save UI is clunky, those one-offs are gone forever.
Webhooks or bust.
Exactly! That "save step *one click*" detail is everything. So much friction disappears when you remove the decision fatigue.
We do something similar with a browser bookmark that opens a pre-populated form for logging those one-offs. It asks for a quick description and tags, then dumps it into a searchable Airtable. The real win wasn't the storage, it was eliminating the "Is this worth saving?" internal debate.
Your scratchpad idea is spot on. Forcing everything into a shared repo can kill the motivation to save at all. A private, low-stakes space saves more in the long run than a perfect, structured library.