AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Monitor and troubleshoot solutions by using Application Insights

Application Insights is an Azure service designed to help you detect, diagnose, and understand issues in your applications. It collects real-time telemetry data from both cloud and on-premises environments. By integrating Application Insights, developers gain visibility into how users interact with their solutions. This visibility helps teams maintain application health and improve performance.

Application Insights captures different types of telemetry, including:

• Requests and response times
• Dependencies like database calls and external APIs
• Exceptions and traces for error tracking
• Custom events and metrics
  Each telemetry type provides a piece of the overall performance puzzle. Together, they give you a complete picture of application behavior.

To start collecting telemetry, you can use the Application Insights SDK or enable auto-collection for supported platforms. The SDK lets you add custom telemetry calls, while auto-collection gathers data without extra code. You can also configure sampling to reduce data volume and control costs. Proper instrumentation ensures you capture the most relevant data for your scenarios.

Once data is flowing, Application Insights offers powerful tools to explore and analyze it. With Log Analytics, you can write queries to dig into detailed events. Workbooks and Dashboards let you create visual reports and share insights with your team. The Live Metrics Stream shows real-time performance, letting you react quickly to emerging issues. Together, these features help you turn raw data into actionable information.

To stay ahead of problems, you can configure alerts based on specific conditions, such as high response times or exception rates. Alerts can trigger emails, SMS messages, or webhook calls to DevOps pipelines. You can also leverage Smart Detection to automatically spot anomalies. By setting up proactive monitoring, teams can resolve issues before customers are affected.

Conclusion

Application Insights provides a centralized platform to monitor and troubleshoot Azure applications. By collecting telemetry, instrumenting your code, and using analytics tools, you gain deep insights into performance and errors. Proactive alerts and smart detection features help teams maintain high application reliability. Overall, Application Insights is an essential tool for building resilient and performant Azure solutions.