Application Insights

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AZ-305AZ-104AI-300AI-103AZ-900AZ-400DP-800

Each book explains Application Insights in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• APM

  Short for application performance monitoring, the collection of request, dependency, failure and exception telemetry that sits at the heart of Application Insights.

• Azure Monitor

  Observability platform for Azure that brings together metrics, logs and traces from both Azure and hybrid resources so they can be analysed and alerted on.

• Availability tests

  Synthetic monitoring in Application Insights, using standard tests or custom TrackAvailability tests; the older URL ping tests are deprecated and now retire on 30 September 2028 (originally 30 September 2026).

• Usage analytics

  Application Insights tooling for understanding behaviour: who the users are, their sessions, retention, funnels and the flows they follow.

• Application Map

  Diagram in Application Insights showing the components of an application and how they call each other.

• Dedicated cluster

  To encrypt Azure Monitor Logs with your own keys, the Log Analytics workspace must be linked to this cluster tier. Setting a CMK on a storage account gives Log Analytics no such protection.

Related terms

• Agent Monitoring Dashboard

  View in Microsoft Foundry, powered by Application Insights, that tracks token consumption, latency, successful runs and evaluation scores and can raise alerts. It gives visibility at runtime and is not a gate for releases.

• Application Insights Profiler

  Capability of Application Insights that records performance traces from a running app, revealing slow requests and hot paths in the code. User behaviour is not what it profiles.

• Auto-instrumentation

  Turning on Application Insights for an app without changing its code, for instance through the App Service blade.

• azure-ai-projects

  Python SDK for Microsoft Foundry; its AIProjectClient opens a connection to a project, and telemetry.get_application_insights_connection_string() fetches the connection string of the Application Insights resource linked to that project.

• Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro

  Recommended way to instrument applications for Application Insights today: Microsoft's packaged OpenTelemetry, sending logs, metrics and traces there. Python apps switch it on by calling configure_azure_monitor().

• Cloud role name

  Labels a service as a node on Application Insights' Application Map. Under OpenTelemetry its value comes from service.name and service.namespace, which can be set with OTEL_SERVICE_NAME, for instance.

• configure_azure_monitor

  Single setup call in the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry distro: pass it an Application Insights connection_string and your app's telemetry (logs, metrics, traces) flows into Azure Monitor.

• End-to-end transaction details

  A view in Application Insights that draws a Gantt chart of every request, dependency call and exception making up a single transaction, across all the components being monitored.