Operational monitoring is seldom front of mind for developers and is not usually considered as in the non functional requirements, let alone being on the radar of the business or product owner. However when there are issues in the live system, it can be very difficult to resolve them without insight into what is happening
(or was happening at the time of the issue) on the system
Azure Application Insights provides amazing insight into the ongoing operation of the system with no work required by developers. Application Insights works from on premise IIS servers as well as cloud hosted applications. Only minimal configuration is required to get it working.
Metrics work right out the box, for example; failed requests, server request load, server response times. Once your application is sending the instrumentation data through, the tooling provides valuable insights at a high level, with drill down capabilities.
Azure provides 1GB of free instrumentation data ingestion a month, there after “pay as go” . You are able to configure sampling and daily caps to keep costs firmly under control.
The key benefit of using Application Insights is troubleshooting performance and other issues with ease. You are also able to be proactive and identify issues before they are reported by users by setting up alerts.
We make use of Application Insights on Bauzer and most of our other production applications. It is critical to our support process, and means that developers do not spend time building out instrumentation and monitoring functionality, so they are freed up to deliver key business value.