Application Insights

Recently I have been working a lot with Microsoft Application Insights. As a tool for application logging, I have found it to be very robust. The KQL language, while slightly different from standard SQL, is great for filtering of data to pull the relevant pieces that you really need.

One of the cool tables is the performance table:

Most of the tutorials out there use this as an example, and you can set up alerts in the case of issues within the log files. This allows you to be more responsive to downtime, even before calls start coming in from customers or other failures.

Here is an excellent pluralsight course which goes over KQL and references practical examples on the application insights performance table:

https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/kusto-query-language-kql-from-scratch/table-of-contents

The number of alerts you can set up is also quite extensive:

I’ve only created “availability” alerts so far, but look forward to exploring the more advanced alerts to enhance our DevOps.