Application insights give you telemetry on how people use your application lets you focus on the scenarios that are most important to your target audience. You can gain insights into the goals that they find easier or more difficult to achieve. Application Insights provides two levels of usage tracking:
To enable the application monitoring through PowerShell, only the underlying application settings must be changed. The following sample enables application monitoring for a website called AppMonitoredSite in the resource group AppMonitoredRG. It configures data to be sent to the 012345678-abcd-ef01-2345-6789abcd instrumentation key.
In order to enable Application Insights for a web application, select it from the left pane. You will then have to sign to Azure. If you simply click the blue Add Application Insights button, a new instance of Application Insights will get created into a resource group named ApplicationInsights and it will be named after the IIS web site name. You probably want to name the objects yourself for clarity sake and respect of your corporate naming convention. In order to do this, your first need to select New Application Insights resource and then click the Configure settings link:
This will then configure your web site/application by modifying the web.config of the application and adding the Application Insights DLLs in the bin directory. You will then be asked to restart IIS to complete the setup process.
With Application Insights, you can test the availability of any endpoint that is available over the internet. By setting up web tests, you can simulate web requests into your website or web application from around the world.
To start configuring the web test, enter a descriptive name as the Test name. The Test type defaults to URL ping test but as you can see in the figure below the Multi-Step test is also available. Next, enter the URL to test with this web test. The URL must accessible on the public internet. It can also include query strings and it will follow up to 10 redirects. For illustration purposes I have entered Microsoft.com but for your test you would enter the URL of the website or web application you wish to test.
The main point of performing Availability tests is to be able to simulate calls into your web applications from around the world. Clicking the Test Locations button will cause the Test Locations blade to appear. The location of San Antonio, Texas will be selected by default. There are 16 locations available in total. They can be selected individually (for example, you may wish to create a test for all points within the U.S.) or you can choose them all using the Select/Deselect All check box at the top. Microsoft advises clicking more than one location so you distinguish between website and network issues. Once you have made your selection, click OK to close the blade.
Application Insights Connector provided a way to include Application Insights data into a Log Analytics workspace. This data duplication was required to enable visibility across infrastructure and application data. With Application Insights extended data retention support in March, 2019 and the ability to perform cross-resource queries in addition to being able to view multiple Azure Monitor Application Insights resources, there is no need to duplicate data from your Application Insights resources and send it to Log Analytics. Furthermore, the Connector only sent a subset of the applications properties to Log Analytics, while the cross-resource queries gives you enhanced flexibility.
With infrastructure as a service (IaaS), you can create your own virtual machines (VMs), deploy your apps to them, and deal with the IIS setup and application pools and so on. Then, every time you change an app, you have to deploy it to all the VMs again. If you scale it out, and you have four VMs or eight VMs, it just becomes more onerous. With IaaS, you are responsible for the continuing management of your service. Using App Service plans enables you to run multiple applications on one set of VMs, even if each of the applications is deployed separately.
A Web App is a web application that is hosted in an App Service. The App Service is the managed service in Azure that enables you to deploy a web application and make it available to your customers on the Internet in a very short amount of time. As noted above, you don't directly support the VMs on which your web app runs; they are managed for you. In fact, you don't have access to those underlying VMs.
Note When your web app is created, Azure also creates an Application Insights instance. Application Insights is an analytics service that monitors your live application. It can help you resolve performance issues and understand how your application is used. Application Insights is outside the scope of this book. For more information, check out the Getting Started article about Application Insights: -insights-overview/.
Using the Diagnostics Logs setting, you can enable and disable the different kinds of diagnostics logging for your web app, as shown in Figure 2-31. This includes any logging that the application may do, as well as IIS requests and Failed requests. You can FTP into the site to check the logs; the FTP information is also displayed on that blade.
So to add application insights to my app I went to the app service and clicked "Application Insights". I then clicked enable and create my resource. Note the screenshot below, I had already created my app insights instance. Once you click that and save it will install Application insights into your application.
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