Codemash 2018 – Application Insights: The Magic School Bus for your Web Applications

Presenter: Kevin Griffin

  • Explained why this talk is named after Magic School Bus
    • A skit gone wrong initially, but kept name
    • Similar to show want to dive deep into something as Ms. Frizzle does
  • Application Insights can help to identify
    • What parts of your app are the most hit, so can focus on optimizing those
    • Performance of dependencies
      • Email
      • Credit cards
      • Etc….
    • CPU and memory usage
    • Min/max/avg response rate
    • Error tracking
  • What were the options before Application Insights
    • Vendors
      • New Relic
      • App Dynamics
      • DataDog
      • Stackify
    • Home grown logging and performance counters
      • Buggy and time intensive
    • IIS Log parsing
      • Data tidal wave
  • Application Insights Does What?
    • Cross platform
      • Platforms with libraries that already exist
        • .Net
        • Node.js
        • PHP
        • Objective-C
        • Python
        • Ruby
      • Also an api, so if platform not supported with libraries can make your own naked api calls.
    • Monitors
      • Request rates
      • Response times
      • Failures
      • Tracks dependencies
      • Track exceptions
      • Browser statistics as well
        • Unless they have ad block on
        • Page views
        • Ajax requests
      • User and session tracking
      • Performance
        • CPU and memory utilization
    • What does this cost?
      • Depends on what you are doing and what you are monitoring
      • Pricing
        • Basic
          • Free
          • 1 G of data storage per month
          • 90 days retention
          • $.50 per GB Continuous Export
        • Enterprise
          • $15 per node
          • 200 MB per node each day
          • 90 days retention
          • Unlimited Continuous Export
    • Does my app need to run in Azure?
      • No, runs off an api, just need API key
    • Demo of an app using Application Insights.  Woohoo
      • Dashboard
        •  Alerts
          • Can setup triggers to pop alerts for important thresholds
        • Live Stream
        • Users
        • Smart Detections
        • Availability
        • App Map
        • Charts
          • Mouse over hour gives data for just that hour
    • How to add Application Inights
      • ‘Configure Application Insights’ menu in Visual Studio
        • Walks you through two steps
          • Need the SDK, have to install if don’t have
          • Add Application Insights nuget package
      • Need to create Application Insights resource in Azure
        • Visual Studio will walk you through this as well
        • Need api key for application insights from new resource
    • TelemetryProcessor lets you interrupt telemetry collection and stop or modify processing in certain cases.

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