Azure insights workshop

Training

It is a three days long course led by Microsoft.

• First day was theory about Azure Insights.
• Second day was a lab with PartsUnlimited webshop where Azure Insights is used to track usage of a webshop. After the lab we could show our own cases and Microsoft supported on all questions.
• Third day was about our internal solutions and Microsoft helped where possible.

Purpose

Azure insights shall be used for performance measurement and log analytics of an application, but is not designed for beeing an audit log.

data types

Metrics

• Performance data
• Free of charge
• lightweight
• Near realtime
• Can be used for autoscale
• Not analysable be default, but can be sent to Logs for detailed analyse

Logs

• Needs to be opt in, costs money
• Rich verbose logs
• Can be analyzed

Cloud role name

you should name the cloud role of your app. This helps a lot on the Application map.

Availability test

Can be used to do TLS certificate validity check to warn you when a certificate is about to expire.

Workbooks

There is a SLA Report pre-defined workbook which is a great start for measuring SLAs.

Smart detection recipients

The one with role:

• Monitor Reader
• Monitor Contributor

on subscription, resource group or even azure insights resource will receive the smart detection alerts.

UnlimitedParts Lab

dotnet versions

.Net5 core and VisualStudio 2019 was required to run the application. I struggled a lot to set this up.

Normal dotnet installation folder is: C:\Program Files\dotnet

Under C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared we see the runtimes and there are different ones: Microsoft.AspNetCore.App Microsoft.NETCore.App Microsoft.WindowsDesktop.App

And only the dotnet-install.ps1 could install a specific one.

dotnet --list-sdks
dotnet --list-runtimes

// this will install the specified version into: Microsoft.NETCore.App
./dotnet-install.ps1 -Architecture x64 -InstallDir "C:\Program Files\dotnet\" -Runtime dotnet -Version 6.0.16

./dotnet-install.ps1 -Architecture x64 -InstallDir "C:\Program Files\dotnet\" -Runtime dotnet -Version 5.0.17

Enable Azure insights for dotnetcore application

There is a wizard on VisualStudio to setup AzureInsights. In my case it didn’t work because I got logged out of my account in VS all the time, so I did it manually following this: follow this manual

• Install the Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore Nuget package
• Add builder.Services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry(); on Pragram.cs
• Add ApplicationInsights.ConnectionString to appsettings.json

Kusto Detective agent

To learn Kusto language: https://detective.kusto.io/

Questions

How many AzureInsights instances should we create

If possible: Only one. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/separate-resources and https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/logs/workspace-design#design-strategy

Why we don’t see exceptions on azure insights for our app

Configuration order

order of config

Startup.cs

ConfigureServices method

Configure services: Order of methods called doesn’t matter

Configure method

Configure method is actually a pipeline where the order of the methods calls matter.