Showing posts with label AppDynamics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AppDynamics. Show all posts

Thursday 1 October 2020

App Insights - Basic Introduction

OverviewAzure App Insights is a great platform for collecting logs and monitoring cloud based applications on Azure.  All Azure Services can push logging information into App Insight instances.  This can be errors, usages, performances logging that in turn is easy to query.  There are SDKs for developers that can be used to add custom logging to applications.  I am a big fan of AppDynamics for logging and monitoring but for SaaS and on a new project I'd go with App Insights.

Retention:  App Insights can keep 730 days worth of logs.  For long term storage, "Continuous Export" can be used to push data into storage accounts as soon as it arrives in AppInsights.  Retaining the App Insight logs for 90 days has no additional cost, so the default to store logs should be set to 90 days at least in most situations.

What is logged and what can be logged:  
  • All Azure Services can be configured to send service logs to a specific App Insight instance.
  • Instrument packages can be added to services to capture logs such as IIS, or background services.  You can pull in telemetry from infrastructure into App insights e.g. Docker logs, system events.
  • Custom code can also call the App Insight instance to add logging and hook into exceptions handling.  There are .NET, Node.JS, Python and other SDK's that should e used to add logging, exception capturing, performance and usage statistics.

App Insights has a REST API to query the logs.  The "API Explorer" tool is awesome for querying App Insights online.  


The data below comes from Microsoft Docs.

"What kinds of data are collected?

The main categories are:

  • Web server telemetry - HTTP requests. Uri, time taken to process the request, response code, client IP address. Session id.
  • Web pages - Page, user and session counts. Page load times. Exceptions. Ajax calls.
  • Performance counters - Memory, CPU, IO, Network occupancy.
  • Client and server context - OS, locale, device type, browser, screen resolution.
  • Exceptions and crashes - stack dumps, build id, CPU type.
  • Dependencies - calls to external services such as REST, SQL, AJAX. URI or connection string, duration, success, command.
  • Availability tests - duration of test and steps, responses.
  • Trace logs and custom telemetry - anything you code into your logs or telemetry."
App Insights creates a hierarchy of requests built up from the operationId, and operation_parentId.

Application Insights is part of Azure Monitor and makes it easy to trace user interaction.  Independent infrastructure for recording issues and tracing.   App Insights in 3 parts. 
  • Collect: Track infra/PaaS via instrumentation (throughput, speed, response times, failure rates, exceptions etc.), and via SDK (e.g. JavaScript SDK, C#) to add custom logging and tracing.  Blue boxes
  • Store: Stores the data.  Purple Box
  • Insights: Alerts, PowerBI, live metrics, REST API.  Green Box
Extending App Insights:
For long running operations like using queues or ESB you will need to tie the operations together, and it's really easy to connect this in a hierarchy using distributed tracing.  

SPA's:  There is a JavaScript SDK but logging on SPA's needs configuration and understanding as not every operation is logged uniquely for tracing.

Smart Detection: automatically tries to quickly warn you of problems/abnormalities and there root cause.

Snapshot Debugger/profiler: VS remote debugging can be hooked to an issue.  Shows execution traces from your live app.

Transaction Search:  Easy way to query and find data or unique info.