Introduction
This article will help you understand the basics of Application Insights on Microsoft Azure and their applications.
What are Application Insights?
This is a very effective service on Microsoft Azure which helps us in tracking the performance and usage of our device app or web application. We can apply it on any application whether it is hosted on "on premise" or on "Azure cloud".
Applications of Application Insights
Let's have a look at these bullet points which are most effective on Azure, under Application Insights
- Track the availability, performance monitoring, and alerts.
- Track the adoption and usage with pages, events, and metrics.
- Search traces and exception logs for failure diagnosis.
- Support for multiple frameworks/platform and HTML websites.
- Add to new or existing projects with Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and later.
- Get telemetry for existing apps without redeploying.
Application Insights work role
The data from our application is sent to the portal via HTTPS and is shown in a comprehensive and flexible UI. The plotted data is segregated into different lanes, as per the source they are collected from.
We do have an Application Insights SDK which enables us to add customized application log collection for Application Insights.
C#: using Microsoft.ApplicationInsights;
VB: Imports Microsoft.ApplicationInsights
Java: import com.microsoft.applicationinsights.TelemetryClient;
TelemetryClient is the main class which provides same API across all platforms to data logging on server-side.
| TrackPageView | Pages, screens, blades or forms |
| TrackEvent | User actions and other events. Used to track user behavior or to monitor performance. |
| TrackMetric | Performance measurements such as queue lengths not related to specific events |
| TrackException | Log exceptions for diagnosis. Trace where they occur in relation to other events and examine stack traces. |
| TrackRequest | Log the frequency and duration of server requests for performance analysis. |
| TrackTrace | Diagnostic log messages. You can also capture 3rd-party logs. |
Follow my next articles to work on configuring IIS Server to use Application Insight, add Application Insights on your existing web application, or a new one - add web client telemetry, adding custom telemetry, etc.