Application map

1. Application map

Welcome back, in the last lesson we covered instrumentation, let's now learn about application map!

2. When troubleshooting gets messy

Modern cloud apps aren’t a single box anymore. They’re a web of services, APIs, databases, and external dependencies. When something breaks, the hardest part isn’t fixing it, it’s figuring out where the problem actually is.

3. Introducing application map

This is where Application Map comes in. Application Map gives you a live, visual topology of your application and everything it depends on.

4. What is application map?

Application Map is a feature of Application Insights that provides a real-time visual representation of your application’s architecture. It automatically discovers components such as web apps, APIs, databases, and external dependencies, then maps how they communicate with each other based on telemetry collected at runtime. By using distributed tracing data, Application Map builds this topology without requiring manual configuration or custom diagrams, helping you quickly understand system behavior and identify problem areas during troubleshooting.

5. How application map is created

As mentioned in the previous slide, application map is built using distributed tracing. When a request flows through your system, telemetry follows it across services. Application Map stitches those traces together to build a dependency graph, without you writing custom tracing code.

6. Reading the map

Each node represents a component such as a web app or database and each line represents a dependency, an outbound call to another service. This gives you an immediate architectural overview, even for systems you didn’t build yourself.

7. Key metrics

Every node shows critical metrics like average latency, request count, and failure rate. You can spot problem services at a glance, without running a single query.

8. Dependency health

A red or orange line often means high latency or failures depending on the sensitivity configured. This answers a common troubleshooting question: Is my app slow, or is something it depends on slow?

9. Application map in microservices

In microservice architectures, Application Map becomes essential because a single user request often passes through many independent services. It visually shows how requests flow across these services, making it easier to trace problems as they move from one component to another. By exposing unhealthy dependencies and failure patterns, Application Map helps you identify cascading failures and quickly understand the blast radius of an issue, so you can focus on the services that actually need attention.

10. The hidden bottleneck

A logistics company runs an order processing system with multiple services and a third-party shipping API. After a new release, customers report slow order confirmations during peak traffic, even though the application never goes down.

11. The challenge without application map

Service metrics and logs look normal, and there are no clear errors. The team scales services and rolls back changes, but without visibility into dependencies, the root cause remains hidden.

12. The outcome with application map

Application Map shows high latency on calls to the external shipping API, while other services remain healthy. The team adds timeouts and retries, resolving the issue in minutes instead of hours or even days.

13. Summary

Application Map provides a real-time visual view of your application’s architecture and dependencies using telemetry from Application Insights. It helps you quickly understand how components communicate, where latency or failures occur, and how issues propagate across services. By reducing guesswork, it enables faster root-cause analysis in distributed and microservice based applications.

14. Let's practice!

Let's get hands on!

Create Your Free Account

By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.