This document discusses Application Insights, a service that provides automatic instrumentation of applications to monitor application health and performance. It provides an overview of logging benefits, costs of logging, and how Application Insights addresses these. The document outlines how Application Insights can instrument applications automatically or with custom logging, and demonstrates setting up synthetic monitors and custom logging.

1. Introduzione ad Application
Insights
Gian Maria Ricci
alkampfer@nablasoft.com - @alkampfer
http://www.codewrecks.com/
http://www.getlatestversion.it/author/alkampfer/

2. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Agenda
• Some overview on logging and application insights
• Demo – demo - demo

3. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Why logging?
• Troubleshooting problems in production
• Monitor application health in production
• Gain telemetry data for your business
• Help developer writing code faster (really??)

4. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Loggin costs….
• Time: spent to instrument your application
• Time: spent to create visualization and dashboards
• Money: for storage and resources needed to store vast amount of
data
• Time: to maintain more code only devoted to logging infrastructure

5. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Application Insights
• Automatic instrumentation of applications (asp.net, Window Phone,
Windows Store, Java Web)
• IIS agent to gain data from existing applications
• One click instrumentation setup in Visual Studio
• Instrument application after creation or before creation
• Ability to use custom logging

6. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
demo
Create your first application insights enabled web application

7. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Existing and deployed web applications
• IIS agent installable with Web Platform Installer
• Few click configuration to monitor existing applications
• No need to modify code to obtain base metrics
• Add classic javascript snippet to track more metrics.

8. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
demo
Start monitor existing application with IIS Agent

9. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Synthetic Monitors
• Verify status of your web application from different azure servers
around the world
• Simple ping test to verify some critical pages responds within specific
response time range
• Use Visual Studio WebTest to test a complex navigation path

10. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
demo
Synthetic Monitors for your application with simple ping or .webTest file

11. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Obtrusive VS UnObtrusive
• Unobtrusive
• Using an agent-only approach does not require developers intervention
• Simple deploy on production/test/staging server and start having data
• Obtrusive
• Ability to track more metrics automatically
• Custom data sent from developers to application insights monitor
• Track business goal
• Need to write code

12. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Choose right strategy
Unobtrusive
Obtrusive
instrumented
Obtrusive
custom
logging code
approach

13. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
demo
Write code to send custom logs to Application Insights

14. #CDays14 – Milano 25, 26 e 27 Febbraio 2014
Recap
• Application Insights just exited from preview
• You can try it on your existing application with few clicks
• Lots of data automatically tracked without needs for developer
intervention
• Ability to add custom metric to profile your application