Azure Data Explorer cluster naming convention

The CAF abbreviation for Azure Data Explorer cluster is dec. Names can be 4 to 22 characters long and allow lowercase alphanumerics only. The name must be globally unique across all of Azure.

Naming rules

Rules follow Microsoft's resource naming rules and CAF abbreviations. Some resource types have extra start/end character restrictions, so verify against the official docs before locking in a convention.

Naming Analytics and IoT resources

This category mixes two very different patterns. Event Hubs namespaces and IoT Hubs are globally unique DNS endpoints, the same two layer pattern as Service Bus, a shared namespace holds individually scoped event hubs inside it. Less obviously, every HDInsight cluster type (Hadoop, HBase, Kafka, Spark, Storm, ML Services) is also globally unique, since each one gets its own public HTTPS endpoint, a detail that is easy to miss because a cluster does not look like an endpoint resource the way a storage account does.

Synapse workspaces behave the same way. Data Factory pipelines and datasets, by contrast, are scoped to the factory and benefit more from naming that reflects data lineage, source to destination, than from a length limit you need to fight. The common mistake here is treating Data Explorer and HDInsight clusters as ordinary scoped resources and picking a name that later collides globally, when they should get the same DNS safe treatment as a storage account from the start.

Example names

Generated by the same engine as the name generator, so length and character rules are already applied.

Naming in Terraform and Bicep

Build the name from variables so one module produces the right name in every environment. The 22-character limit is enforced in the expression.

locals {
  data_explorer_cluster_name = substr(lower("dec${var.workload}${var.environment}${var.region}001"), 0, 22)
}

var dataExplorerClusterName = take(toLower('dec${workload}${environment}${region}001'), 22)

Related Analytics and IoT resources

See the full list of Azure resource naming rules or read the complete CAF naming guide.