In this post I’ll be taking a look at Application Insights customisation and OMS Integration.
Custom Dashboards
You can pin the out-of-the-box charts to your Azure Portal dashboard by clicking on the pin in the top right corner. Analytics query charts can also be pinned using the same method but they are pinned to shared dashboards. Shared dashboards exist as an Azure resource in a resource group and you can use RBAC to control access to it.
Alerts
You can create alerts based on the telemetry in Application Insights, you will find the Alert Rule button in the Metrics Explorer blade.
Currently you can only create alert rules based on out-of-the-box telemetry but not from custom events or analytics queries. Good news is the feature is in preview so it should be available soon, link to uservoice.
Correlating Entries And Custom Properties
By default Application Insights populates the operation_id for every web request and propagates that operation_id to dependencies that it is able to trace out -of-the-box for example SQL Server queries and WCF calls to HTTP endpoints. The example below is for SQL Server queries joined to web requests.
If you have a dependency that Application Insight can’t trace automatically or you have multiple levels of dependencies you have to provide your own solution to propagate the operation_id or your own contextual identifier like customer id. You can do this by creating a TelemetryInitializer to add your custom id or to grab the web request id and pass it along to the other services, example here.
OMS Integration
You can view and query your Application Insights telemetry in OMS by installing the OMS Application Insights solution from the OMS portal and configuring which applications you want to connect from Application Insights.
You can connect multiple applications from different subscriptions which makes it easy to create a consolidated view. You can correlate Application Insights telemetry with other data sources in OMS like infrastructure telemetry making it easier to pinpoint the cause of slow application response.
VSTS Integration
You can install Application Insight widgets on your VSTS dashboards to surface Application Insight data in VSTS, link to marketplace.
PowerBI Integration
There is a content pack to create PowerBI dashboards with telemetry from Application Insights, link here. The content pack comes with a set of built-in dashboards. If you need a custom dashboard you can export Analytics Queries to PowerBI as explained here.
Custom Telemetry
Contextual logging and telemetry that makes sense in a business context for instance orders completed per second or aborted shopping carts can be a very powerful tool to get useful information out of logs and to track problems related to a specific customer interaction. To achieve this you can add your own telemetry to Application Insights by writing custom events and logging exceptions, link here. You can also have your favorite logging library writing to Application Insights, examples here.
