Introduction

Rainer Stropek

• Passionate developer since 25+ years
   
• Microsoft MVP, Regional Director
   
• Trainer, Teacher, Mentor
   
• 💕 community

https://rainerstropek.me

Why Application Insights?

Application Performance Monitoring

• Detect performance anomalies
• Diagnose issues
• See what users do
• Basis for continuous improvement
  • Performance
  • Stability
  • Build what users really need

OpenTelemetry

• Microsoft supports OpenTelemetry
• Independent of cloud environment
  • Not just Azure
• Disadvantage: Fewer features compared to native App Insights
• Choose based on project needs
  • Do you value portability over features?
• Here: Focus on App Insights

Auto-Instrumentation vs. App Insights SDKs

Auto-Instrumentation

• aka "Codeless" approach
• No need to change your code at all
• Supports a large number of platforms and Azure services 🔗
• Collects telemetry data automatically
• Disadvantage: Functional limitations

Add App Insights SDK

• Enable Application Insights by adding SDK

  • Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore

• ​(Minimal) Code additions necessary

• SDK will gather data

  • Auto-instrumentation will back off automatically
    if SDK is detected

• ​Not just for ASP.NET Core

  • ​For background worker services 🔗

  • For console apps 🔗

• ​Recommended approach if possible

Demo
Time!

ASP.NET Core BFF

• Create new ASP.NET Core Web API
• Discuss adding App Insights with Visual Studio tools 🔗
• Demo manual adding of App Insights 🔗
  • Add NuGet Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore

  • builder.Services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry();

• Demo ApplicationInsightsServiceOptions

• Demo gathering of telemetry...

  • ...in Visual Studio

  • ...in the Azure Portal

Telemetry Initializers/Processors

• Plugins for App Insights
• Enrich/process/filter telemetry before it is sent
• Differences between processors and initializers.
  In short...
  • Initializers enrich telemetry
  • Processors can completely replace or
    discard (=filter) telemetry items

Demo
Time!

Correlation

What is Correlation?

• End-to-end view of transactions
• Important in distributed systems
  • E.g. Microservices architecture

Read more at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/correlation

Demo
Time!

ASP.NET Core Backend

• Add Backend API
• Demonstrate Operation ID

What Else?

Azure AD Authentication

• Ensure that only authenticated telemetry is ingested
• Important if business decisions are made based on telemetry data

Read more at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/azure-ad-authentication?tabs=net

Gather IP Addresses

• By default, IP addresses are only used for geolocation lookup
  • After that, IP addresses are replaced by 0.0.0.0
  • Privacy reasons
• You can enable storing IP addresses (disable IP masking)

Read more at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/ip-collection?tabs=net#storage-of-ip-address-data

Sampling

• Adaptive sampling (recommended)
  • Volume of telemetry is adjusted automatically
  • Setting MaxTelemetryItemsPerSecond
• Fixed-rate sampling
  • Limit telemetry based on a fixed rate (e.g. 10%)
• Ingestion sampling
  • Sampling is done by App Insights, not before sending
  • Only use if other options are not feasilbe

Channels

• In-memory channel
  • Lightweight
  • Buffers in memory
  • Flushed every 30 seconds or 500 items or manual Flush()
  • Good for short-running applications
• Server telemetry channel
  • Stores data on disk, retries sending (e.g. short network outage)
  • Recommended (and default) for production web app/APIs