Kickstart to Application Insights in Windows Azure

Application Insights is a Microsoft Azure Service that informs you about the performance and usage of your device app or web application. You can apply it to any application, whether or not it runs in Azure.

  1. Availability, performance monitoring and alerts.
  2. Track adoption and usage with pages, events & metrics.
  3. Search traces and exception logs for failure diagnosis.
  4. Support for multiple frameworks/platform and HTML websites.
  5. Add to new or existing projects with Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and later.
  6. Get telemetry for existing apps without redeploying.

The data from your application is sent to the portal via HTTPS and is shown in a comprehensive and flexible UI. The plotted data is segregated into different lens as per the source they are collected pulled from.

We also have Application Insights SDK which enables you 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.

We will be working with Application Insights on ASP, .Net Applications under Windows Azure on future posts.