Monitoring Services: Azure Application Insights

Introduction

Whenever we build a software system, monitoring is a crucial part. We will need to monitor performance, collect logs and identify any potential issues that may occur during the application operation. There are many monitoring tools in the market, such as New Relic, ELK stack, and NLOG, among many others. When it comes to Azure, we have Azure Application Insights. It is an Azure cloud service that enables us to monitor application performance and usage, collect logs, track user activity, and detect exceptions and errors. Azure Application Insights is always associated with a compute resource, such as Azure App Service, Azure Function App, or even an application running on a virtual machine.

Key features of Azure Application Insights

Azure Application Insights is a powerful resource that supports many features. Let us see some of them:

• Live metrics: This enables us to monitor our application metrics in real-time as they come.
• Logs: Enables us to receive and query application logs.
• Availability: Enables us to monitor the availability of our applications and send notifications if somethings go wrong.
• GitHub or Azure DevOps integration: This enables us to create work items (such as bugs) in the corresponding platform based on the data collected from Application Insights.
• Usage: This enables understanding our application’s user journey and behavior.