Exploring Application Insights
1. Exploring Application Insights
Welcome back! In the last Chapter, we explored key concepts within Azure Monitor. Let's take it a step further and explore more advanced features beginning with Application Insights.2. Application Insights
Trying to understand what is happening inside an application can feel like scrolling through endless logs, hoping to spot what is wrong. It is slow, repetitive, and can be frustrating.3. Application Insights
What you really need is a tool that does the hard work for you, collecting data, spotting issues, and giving you clarity instantly. That is exactly what Azure Application Insights does.4. What is Application Insights
Application Insights is a monitoring service within Azure that helps you understand how your application behaves in the real world. It collects telemetry automatically, including request rates, failures, response times, performance and external dependencies. It is language agnostic and works wherever your app runs.5. Why Application Insights matters
Instead of waiting for a user to tell you something is broken, you can find performance problems early, trace the root cause, and observe how customers use your features. It turns raw telemetry into meaningful insights.6. How Application Insights works
The process is simple: your application sends telemetry through an SDK or agent. Azure ingests the data, processes it, and provides dashboards, charts, and detailed traces so you can troubleshoot effectively.7. Distributed tracing in action
One of the most powerful features is distributed tracing. You can follow a user’s request across multiple services and dependencies, seeing exactly where a slowdown or failure occurred. There is no more guessing which service caused the issue. Application Insights shows you the entire journey.8. Live metrics
Live Metrics allows you to see what is happening right now. You get real-time charts for request rates, failures, and performance without waiting for data ingestion. It is especially useful during deployments or incident response.9. Integrations across Azure services
Application Insights integrates naturally across Azure services. Whether you are running an App Service, Function App, AKS, containers, or APIs, it stitches telemetry together automatically. This makes it a central tool for observability across your entire architecture.10. Put into practice
This is your monitoring hub. Application Insights tracks availability and failures, and both alert types route into a single action group that sends notifications to your team.11. Put into practice
During your morning checks, Application Insights shows that several availability signals have started failing. The alert rule triggers and your on-call engineer receives a notification immediately.12. Put into practice
The engineer investigates, identifies the cause, and restores the system. Application Insights automatically recognizes that availability has returned to normal and sends a resolved alert.13. Put into practice
If a release suddenly increases failed requests, Application Insights detects the change and alerts the team. This helps you catch deployment-related failures before users experience a full outage.14. Summary
Application Insights gives you clear visibility into how your application behaves. It's easy to enable across Azure services and immediately starts collecting useful telemetry like requests, dependencies, and exceptions. With distributed tracing and live metrics, you can follow requests through your system and spot issues in real time. Altogether, it helps you troubleshoot faster and improve overall performance and reliability.15. Let's practice!
Let's jump in and explore Application Insights!Create Your Free Account
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