Using Application Insights to Monitor your Applications

Transcription

1 Using Application Insights to Monitor your Applications Overview In this lab, you will learn how to add Application Insights to a web application in order to better detect issues, solve problems, and continuously improve the application for your users. While this lab uses an ASP.NET MVC web application as an example, Application Insights also supports Java web applications, WCF services, Windows Phone, and Windows Store apps. Contents Overview... 1 Prerequisites... 1 Exercise 1: Getting Started with Application Insights... 2 Task 1: Adding Application Insights to a New Project... 2 Task 2: Configuring Web Application to Collect Client Analytics... 2 Task 3: Using Application Insights Locally... 3 Task 4: Additional Instrumentation and Custom Events... 3 Task 5: Publishing Web Application to Azure... 4 Task 6: Analyzing Application Insights Data... 4 Task 7: Proactive Monitoring with Alerts... 5 Cleanup... 6 Prerequisites The following are required to complete this lab: Microsoft Azure account with active subscription. You can create a trial Azure account. Estimated time to complete this lab: 30 minutes.

2 Exercise 1: Getting Started with Application Insights In this exercise, you will learn how to add Application Insights to a web application, record custom events, analyze Application Insights data in the Azure portal, and enable proactive monitoring and alerts. Task 1: Adding Application Insights to a New Project 1. Launch an instance of Visual Studio from the taskbar. 2. Select File New Project and then select the Visual C# Web node. 3. Select the ASP.NET Web Application template. 4. Ensure that the Add Application Insights to Project option is selected. 5. At this point, you should be prompted to sign in to Azure using your credentials. Sign in to add your account to Visual Studio. 6. Note that telemetry will be sent to a new Application Insights resource by default. Accept the default by clicking OK. 7. Click OK to launch the new ASP.NET project wizard. Note that the wizard now shows ASP.NET 4.6 as well as ASP.NET 5 templates. 8. Select the MVC template, select the option to Host in the cloud and then click OK. 9. In the Configure Microsoft Azure Website window, use the default suggestion for Site Name. 10. Select the Central US region. 11. Select a database server or create a new one and provide the necessary configuration. 12. Click OK to continue. Note that it will take a few moments for the needed NuGet packages to be downloaded and for the needed Azure resources to be created. 13. After all of the configured resources are created, the Azure web site should be ready, but the web application will not have been deployed yet. 14. Note the PublishScripts folder that was added to the solution. This folder contains PowerShell scripts and configuration that automate the publication of the web application to Azure. 15. Double-click on ApplicationInsights.config that is added to the project to open it. This configuration file specifies the various telemetry modules and initializers to use, as well as the Application Insights telemetry key. Task 2: Configuring Web Application to Collect Client Analytics 1. Right-click on the ApplicationInsights.config in Solution Explorer and select the Open Application Insights option. 2. In the browser window that opens, sign into Azure using your credentials and then navigate to the new Application Insights resource that you just created (if necessary). If you have multiple directories associated with your Azure subscription, you may also need to select the correct subscription first. 3. The Application Insights blade shows an overview of the last 24 hours of data that includes availability, performance & diagnostics, and usage. Since the website has not been deployed or used yet, you will not see any application data here. Click on one of the tiles from the Application Health section at the top of the blade. 4. Click on the link that reads Get code to monitor my web pages.

3 5. Copy the script code block that is presented to the clipboard. This script will enable the collection of usage analytics from the end-user. 6. Return to Visual Studio and load _Layout.cshtml (try using the search box in Solution Explorer). 7. Place the cursor immediately before the closing </head> tag and then paste in the JavaScript. Note that this includes the instrumentation key. Note: You can take advantage of the JavaScript SDK for any web application, even if it is not built with ASP.NET. 8. Take note of the last line of script that makes use of the JavaScript SDK to send client-side data to the Application Insights service. You may be asked a question regarding this at the end of the lab. Task 3: Using Application Insights Locally 1. Now that we have configured Application Insights for the application, we can test it out by running locally. Press F5 to launch the MVC application. 2. Exercise the application by clicking on Home, About, Contact pages. 3. Close the browser window and return to Visual Studio. You should see a popup stating that Your first Application Insights events have been sent! 4. Return to the Application Insights blade in the Azure portal and note that some application performance and usage data is now available. Click on the first chart shown on the Overview Timeline that corresponds to server response time. 5. All of the data that you see here was sent during the debugging session that you just performed. 6. It is possible to filter out data that came in during a debugging session. Click the Filters button at the top of Metrics Explorer. 7. In the Filter blade, scroll down and expand the URL Host property and note that only localhost is currently shown. Once you deploy the web application to Azure, you would be able to select that URL host to effectively filter out all data from local debugging. Note: You can also configure Application Insights to disable telemetry for debugging purposes altogether. 8. We ll examine the Application Insights blade in more detail later. Task 4: Additional Instrumentation and Custom Events 1. Open _Layout.cshtml once again and take a look at the IntelliSense for the appinsights object (temporarily remove the period after appinsights to see the IntelliSense, and then re-add the period). Note that the JavaScript SDK includes methods to track events, exceptions, metrics, and traces. 2. Press Escape to prevent modification to the JavaScript. Although we could add in additional instrumentation in the client, we ll opt to just track a custom event on the server.

4 3. Open HomeController.cs in the code editor and add a using statement for Application Insights to the top of the file: using Microsoft.ApplicationInsights; 4. Locate the Contact method and then add the following snippet to the beginning: TelemetryClient client = new TelemetryClient(); client.trackevent("contact Page", new Dictionary<string, string>() {["IsAuthenticated"] = User.Identity.IsAuthenticated.ToString(), ["DayOfWeek"] = DateTime.UtcNow.DayOfWeek.ToString()}, null); Task 5: Publishing Web Application to Azure 1. Right-click on the project node in Solution Explorer and select Publish. 2. The connection should already be setup with Web Deploy, so click the Publish button to initiate the publication process. This process will take a few moments. 3. The published web application should load in a browser window. Exercise the application as you did during the debug session locally. Make sure to visit the Contact page and refresh the page a few times. 4. Navigate to a page that does not exist by modifying the address to be /Demo. This will result in a Not Found response from the server. 5. Click on the Register link in the top-right and go through the process of creating a new account. Then exercise the application as before, ensuring that you visit the Contact page. 6. Close the browser tab. Note: if you are instead hosting your ASP.NET application in IIS, you will need to install the Application Insights Status Monitor. Task 6: Analyzing Application Insights Data 1. Return to the Application Insights blade in the Azure portal and then click the Refresh button. 2. The Application Health section contains the Overview timeline and recent results from simple URL tests and more in-depth webtests. a. The first chart shown is Server Response Time, which represents time between receiving an HTTP request to after sending the response. b. The Browser Page Load Time represents the time between making a HTTP request to after everything is loaded and processed in the browser. c. Server Requests represents a count of HTTP requests. d. Finally, Failed Requests represents the count of HTTP requests that resulted with a response code above 400 (both client side or server side errors). 3. If you take a look at the top of the Application Insights blade, you can see what time range is currently selected (24 hours by default), and what the current grain is (1 hour by default). This

5 can be changed by clicking on the Time Range button, although we do not have a need to do so here. 4. Take a moment to move the mouse cursor over the charts to get an idea what interacting with them is like. Note that you can view the selected data for the period of time that you are near and also determine the hour the data is from by looking at the horizontal axis at the bottom of the charts. 5. It is possible to drill into some charts for further information. Click on the Server Response Time chart to load the Metrics Explorer blade with some additional charts that show additional server-side metrics. Note that there are also charts showing the average server response times by request name and average dependency durations by dependency. 6. Close the Metrics Explorer blade. 7. The next chart is for the availability tests. Since we do not have one setup yet, click on the tile to create one. 8. Provide a Test Name of Landing Page and provide the URL to the Azure Website that you previously created. Modify any of the other settings that you see fit. Go ahead and select a couple more test locations while you are here. Click Create when you are done defining the test. 9. It will take a few minutes for the availability tests to start recording data, so it is suggested that you refresh the Application Insights blade later on to see the results. 10. Scroll down to the Usage Analytics section. Here you can see distinct user counts, session counts, page views, session duration average, and even sessions broken down by country. 11. Click the Users chart to drill into Metrics Explorer. This shows charts for Users, New Users, and Page Views, as well as a chart showing unique users count by country. 12. Close the Metrics Explorer blade. 13. Click the Sessions chart. This shows charts for Sessions, Users, Page Views, Server Requests, and Time Between Sessions. There is also a chart showing breakdown of sessions by browser version. 14. Close the Metrics Explorer blade. 15. Note the Custom Events tile showing the count of Contact Page custom events. Click the custom event to drill into Metrics Explorer. If you take a look at the top of the chart, it is currently filtered on Contact Page. Click the Filters button near the top of the blade and note that the Contact Page event name is shown as selected here also. 16. From the Properties list, note that the two custom properties IsAuthenticated and DayOfWeek show up here as well. Expand the IsAuthenticated property and select either True or False to also filter on that. 17. Close the Filters blade. 18. It is also possible to add additional charts or modify charts. Click on the chart in Metrics Explorer. 19. Here you can change the chart type, height, selected statistics and more. This is an Area chart showing just the sum of custom events. Modify the chart by turning on the Grouping option and then selecting the IsAuthenticated custom property. Note that the chart is updated to show the breakdown of events coming from authenticated versus not authenticated users. 20. Close the Metrics Explorer blade to return to the Application Insights blade. Task 7: Proactive Monitoring with Alerts 1. Scroll down to the bottom of the Web Application blade and then click on the Alert Rules tile.

6 2. Alerts allow you to proactively monitor your applications and receive communication when configured rule conditions are met. For example, if you went with the default options when creating the URL availability test earlier, there should be an active alert for it when the test fails. 3. Click the Add Alert button to add a new alert. 4. In the Resource drop down control, select the (components) resource. 5. Provide a Name of Server response time. 6. Select the Server response time Metric option. 7. You should see a chart showing recent server response time data appear after a few moments. This can be used to provide input into your choice of threshold configuration. Select the greater than Condition option, a threshold of 4 seconds, and a Period of Over the last 5 minutes. 8. Note that you have options to send to the service and co-administrators, as well as additional s if desired. Rather than setting up , simply click the OK button to save the alert. Cleanup Don t forget to clean up the Azure resources that you used during this lab. This includes a Website, SQL database, and Application Insights. Earn Your Points: Visit us at the Visual Studio Online booth and show us your Application Insights metrics, or show the code challenge moderator your Application Insights metrics to get points to redeem prizes. Don t forget to tweet your experience with Visual Studio Online at #Visualstudio