Rules to Better Application Insights

Knowing the holistic health of your application is important once it has been deployed into production. Getting feedback on your Availability, errors, performance, and usage is an important part of DevOps. We recommend using Application Insights, as getting it set up and running is quick, simple and relatively painless.

Application Insights will tell you if your application goes down or runs slowly under load. If there are any uncaught exceptions, you'll be able to drill into the code to pinpoint the problem. You can also find out what your users are doing with the application so that you can tune it to their needs in each development cycle.

The best approach of setting up Application Insights in SharePoint is a bit different than adding to normal web application.

The easiest way to get started with Application Insights is to follow the documentation on Microsoft Learn.

Lets take a look at the overview and our tips to help you get the most out of Application Insights.

Application Insights provide crucial insights into the health and performance of the application. Failed Requests allow the DevOps specialists to identify the specific errors and exceptions occurring in the application. However, keeping Failed Requests clean is crucial to troubleshoot and pinpoint the root causes of the problems efficiently. A cluttered failed requests list filled with irrelevant entries can make it difficult to identify the critical issues that require immediate attention.

Azure Application Insights is your app's friendly doctor, keeping an eye on it to stay healthy and running smoothly. It uses an Instrumentation Key (IK) to allow your app to send telemetry data to its resource.

While this IK isn't a secret and is often included in client-side code, if it IK falls into the wrong hands, they could spam your telemetry or incur extra costs on ApplicationInsights.

The IK does not grant users access to read your data. In order for an application or a user to read your telemetry data, they need to authenticate into Application Insights with Entra ID (used to be Azure AD).

For client-side telemetry (e.g. Static Web Pages, Single Page Apps) the key will be visible in the browser via Dev Tools, but it is comforting to know that all the Application Insights telemetry is sent over HTTPS.

To prevent unintended access, Local authentication (via Instrumentation Key or API Keys) can be disabled for authenticating data ingestion. Once disabled, a stronger authentication method known as Role Based Access Control (RBAC) can be used.

Application Insights can provide an overwhelming amount of errors in your web application, so use just-in-time bug processing to handle them.

As soon as you have configured Application Insights, you should immediately add a Web Test to track general performance trends over time. You can configure test agents to access your application from different locations around the globe to give a general idea of what users will experience.

Nothing is worse than having your site down being unaware for a long period of time.

Before starting any work, you should ensure developers take a look at your Application Insights data to make sure everything is performing correctly.

You've set up your Application Insights as per the rule 'Do you know how to set up Application Insights.

Your daily failed requests are down to zero & You've tightened up any major performance problems.

Now you will discover that understanding your users' usage within your app is child's play.