These slides give an introduction to the features App Insights provide. Also, it will present some tips and tricks you might find useful.

1. Azure
Application
Insights
An introduction
Matthias Güntert – November 2021

2. Agenda
• What is Application Insights?
• What does it monitor?
• Investigation Tools
• Usage Analysis
• Tips & Tricks (optional)

3. About me
Personal
• Father of two kids
• Digital photographer
• Supermoto rider
• Blogger: www.azureblue.io
Professional
• Azure Cloud Enthusiast & Solution Architect
• Work for Solveva, a company focusing on software
solutions in the insurance sector

4. What is Application Insights?
• Application Monitoring solution
• Feature of Azure Monitor
• Collects logs & metrics
• Server- & Client side monitoring
• Both Azure & Non-Azure
• Code-based & code-less monitoring
• Code-based via SDK integration
• Code-less via middleware integration
• e.g. Web Apps, Azure Functions…
• Multiple ways to react

5. What does it monitor?
• Request rates, response times,
failure rates
• Dependency rates, response
times, failure rates
• Exceptions
• Page views, Load performance
• AJAX calls
• User and session counts
• Performance counters
• Host Diagnostics
• Diagnostic Trace Logs
• Custom events & metrics

6. Architecture for Demo

7. Application Maps
Triage Distributed Applications
• Visualize complex topologies
• Spot performance bottlenecks &
failure hotspots
• Across all components
• Component = Independently
deployable parts of
distributed/microservices
application
• Finds components by following
HTTP dependency calls made
between servers with App Insights
SDK installed

8. Smart Detection
Automatic notification of anomalies
• Proactive analysis of app
telemetry
• Automatically detects…
• degradations
• memory leaks
• abnormal rise in exception volume
• abnormal patterns in client or
server performance
• security anti-patterns
• No configuration required
• Get email notifications &
automated alerts

9. Live Metrics
Monitor & Diagnose with 1-second Latency
• See logs & metrics as they come in
• Displays data within seconds
• Metrics Explorer & Analytics requires
minutes
• Data is not getting stored & only
streamed while pane is open
• Free of charge
• Supports
• ASP.NET (Core), .NET (Core)
• Java
• Node.js
• Doesn’t support JavaScript!

10. Transaction search & log analytics
Explore Individual Telemetry Items
• Explore & filter telemetry items
• Visualize metrics
• Drill into end-to-end transaction
details

11. Event Types
Transaction search & log analytics
Event Type Description
Trace • Diagnostic logs
• TrackTrace, log4Net, Nlog, System.Diagnostic.Trace
Request • HTTP requests received by sever application
• Including pages, scripts, images, style files, and data
Page View • Telemetry send by the web client
• Frontend, JavaScript
Custom Event • Calls to TrackEvent()
Exception • Uncaught exceptions in the server
• Calls to TrackException()
• Pay attention to not loose the stacktrace!
Dependency • Calls from server application to other REST APIs, databases, …
• AJAX Calls from client code
Availability • Results of availability tests

12. Transaction diagnostic experience
Parent Node
Timeline view
Create ADO board
items
Transaction details
Transaction search
results
Switch to telemetry view

13. Transaction diagnostic experience

14. Log Analytics
Transaction search & log analytics
• Data gets feeded to
Log Analytics
workspace
• Perform rich queries
with KQL

15. Availability Tests
Monitor Availability & Responsiveness
• Sends web requests at regular
intervals
• Alerts if app isn’t responding
• Supports for types of tests
• URL Ping Test
• Standard Test
• Multi-Step Test
• Custom TrackAvailability() Test

16. Four types of tests
Availability Tests
Test Type Description
URL Ping Test (Classic) • Simple GET request from multiple regions
• Allows to check response body and code
• Created via portal
Standard Test (Preview) • Includes TLS certificate validation checks
• Proactive lifetime check of TLS certificate
• Supports more request verbs, GET, HEAD, POST, …
• Allows to check response body
• Created via portal
Multi-Step Web Test (Classic) • Play back a recording of web request sequences
• Created in Visual Studio Enterprise
Custom TrackAvailability() Test • Created in code

17. Failures
Correlate exceptions with other events
• Reports exceptions on client &
server side
• Correlate requests to exceptions
• See how many users are affected
• Get transactional details

18. Snapshot Debugger
• Automatically collects debug snapshots
• ThresholdForSnapshotting
• View snapshots in portal
• Show call stack & variables
• Protected by RBAC
• Set snap- & logpoints
• Instructs debugger to take snapshots
• Similar to breakpoints, but they don’t halt
the app when hit!
• Available for
• .NET Framework & ASP.NET (4.5)
• .NET Core & ASP.NET Core 2.1, 3.1
• .NET 5
• Environments
• App Service, Functions, …

19. Performance
Measure & Profile Requests
• Get statistics about
• Operations
• Dependencies
• Roles
Logarithmic performance distribution

20. Performance Profiler
• Provides performance traces
• Identify «hot» code path taking
the longest time
• Works with .NET applications
• App Service Basic service tier or
higher
Enable via: App Service > App Insights

21. User, Session & Event Reports
User Behavior Analytics
• Drive decisions about next development cycle based on usage & stats
• Three different perspectives
• Export to CSV, PowerBI, Excel (via log analytics)
• Split graphs by properties (refUri, browser version, OS, country, …)
Report Answers… Counting Method
User Report How many people used my app & features? Anonymous ID in browser cookie
Session Report How many sessions have included certain pages & features? A period of activity by a user, terminated by a period
of inactivity of half an hour
Event Report How often are certain pages & features used? On page load

22. Examples
User, Session & Event Reports
Users Report
Session Report
Users Report split by referer URI

23. Funnels
Monitor step-by-step conversion rate
• Are users processing through
an entire process?
• Track up to 6 custom events
• Create custom events with:
<button
onclick="appInsights.trackEvent({name:'a
dd-item-to-cart'});">Add item to
cart</button>
• Or use Click Analytics Plugin
<button id="add-item-to-cart“>Add item
to cart</button>

24. User Flows
Visualize & Analyze user navigation patterns
• What steps have led to an
exception?
• What are the places users
churn most from the site?
• What do users click on the
site?
Dependencies Pave Views Exceptions Custom Events Requests

25. Cohorts
Group your users
• A set of users, sessions, events or
operations having something in
common
• E.g. users who used app a certain
number of days within a time window
• Similar to filters
• Can be used from
• Users
• Sessions
• Events
• User flow

26. App Insights REST API
Query & integrate with AI data
• Access all app events & metric
data via REST API
• Integrate your data e.g., with
PowerBI, Excel and others
• https://api.applicationinsights.io
• Configure > API Access > Create
API Key
• Application ID != Instrumentation
Key

27. Displaying Client IP Addresses
Tips & Tricks
• By default, only collected
temporarily for geolocation lookup
• IP calc. for client-side telemetry
occurs at the ingestion endpoint in
Azure
• Populated fields
• client_City = …
• client_StateOrProvince = …
• client_CountryOrRegion = …
• client_IP = 0.0.0.0
• Check your compliance
requirements first!
• Disable IP Masking via
• REST Call
• “DisableIpMasking”: true
• Custom Telemetry Initializer
az rest --method patch
--url https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<sub-id>/resourceGroups/<rg-name>/providers/microsoft.insights/components/<resource-name>?api-version=2018-05-01-preview
--body { "location": "<resource location>", "kind": "web", "properties": { "Application_Type": "web", "DisableIpMasking": true } }

28. Live Metrics - Securing control channel
Tips & Tricks
• Custom filters are sent back to
your app/SDK
• May contain confidential data
• Configure > API Access >
Create API key
ASP.NET Core: Startup.cs

29. Log request & response body
Tips & Tricks
• Write custom middleware OR
• Use my nuget package
• dotnet add package
Azureblue.ApplicationInsights.RequestLogging
• Read more
• https://www.azureblue.io/how-to-log-http-request-body-with-asp-net-core-
application-insights/
• https://github.com/matthiasguentert/ApplicationInsightsRequestLogging

30. Client-Side monitoring (JavaScript)
Tips & Tricks
• Options for setup (don’t mix them)
• Via NPM
• npm i --save @microsoft/applicationinsights-web
• Via code snippet
• Via nuget package (Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore)
• Property: public string FullScript { get; }
• Convenient, but won’t allow configuring the client-side part
• Snippet:
• Should be the first script after <head>

31. Set Cloud Role Name
Tips & Tricks
.NET Core
Java
JavaScript

32. Data Model
• Automatically collected
• Request
• Dependency
• Exception
• Additional types
• Trace
• Metric
• Event