AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Implement Application Insights web tests and alerts

Configure and Analyze Web Tests in Application Insights

Application Insights availability tests (also called web tests or ping tests) are checks that monitor how reachable and responsive your web app is. They send simulated requests to your app’s endpoints at regular intervals from different geographic locations. This helps you catch downtime or slow performance before your users experience issues. You can set these tests to run every few minutes and watch for any failures.

To create a web test, open your Application Insights resource in the Azure portal and go to the Availability section. Choose from:

• Simple URL ping test for a basic HTTP request.
• Standard availability tests for more control over HTTP methods, success criteria, and content checks.
  For each test, set the frequency (for example, every 5 minutes) and pick the test locations around the world. Make sure you enable alerts so that failures trigger Azure Monitor rules.

By default, availability tests include state-based alerts, which send one notification when an endpoint goes down and another when it recovers. This approach prevents alert fatigue by avoiding repeated messages for the same outage. You can customize the alert criteria by changing how often Azure evaluates the test results and by adjusting how many regions must fail before firing an alert. These settings let you ignore short glitches or planned maintenance.

For more control, use the Alerts tab to create custom alert rules. You can pick Metrics as the signal type and choose to alert on:

• X out of Y locations reporting failures
• Aggregated availability metrics
• Custom log queries for any condition
  Then link these rules to action groups to notify your team by email, SMS, or other channels. You can even set up automated responses to speed up incident handling.

Conclusion

Monitoring your web application with Application Insights helps you stay ahead of problems by running regular availability tests from multiple locations. You learn about performance issues quickly and keep your service reliable.

Customizing your alert criteria ensures you only get notified about real issues, not every tiny blip. Using state-based alerts and adjusting evaluation settings helps reduce unnecessary noise.

Advanced configurations, such as custom alert rules and action groups, give you full control over how and when your team is alerted. This proactive setup supports faster incident response and better user experience.