INTRODUCTION TO APPLICATION INSIGHT

If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it – H.James Harrington

 

Background

In order to improve continuously we need to measure how our apps are performing? How users are using our application? Only then we will be able to improve the applications and prioritize the investment accordingly.

Why App building is So hard ?

  • Need For Speed – Keep updating your app’s performance, latency, availability, reliability etc.
  • Constant Evolution – With competition every competitor is adding new features to beat the competition.
  • Continuous Delivery – In Agile world, Apps release has become very fast.

 

Typical life-cycle of an Application

 

lifecycle

Development Phase

With this lifecycle there are certain challenges and blockers , while planning we need to understand what users are looking for rather than taking the decision on the basis of the your assumptions it’s always good to have some real time data.

 

 

We need to have tools and processes where devs and service engineer can talk to each other and both have no Idea that what’s wrong with the Application. One of the biggest challenges for an application to run smoothly is the blame game played by the devs and the Operations engineer so the concept of DevOps comes into the picture and setting up application insights or other tool is one the core responsibility of the DevOps.

 

During the time of release, we need a constant 360 degree view so that we can quickly monitor and diagnose the application in any environment. People just wait for the release but it’s good to have the instrumentation setup for the development as well so that we are well prepared during the development phase and on the dev environment rather than getting issues from the client and users and then digging into the Insights.

 

How Application Insight Works?

 

AI

We need to add the SDK of AppInsights to our application with just a right click -> Add AppInsight or by using the nugget package.

 

 

 

Stage 1  Telemetry can be collected from Server, JavaScript’s, SDKs, Monitor tools where the data is collected like CPU usage, memory usage, page response time etc.

 

Stage 2 We get all the data from different Sources to the Azure Application Insight account. Each Application Insight account has a unique Instrumentation Key which is responsible to maintain the uniqueness of the application and App Insight Account.

 

Stage 3 App Insight provides an inbuilt 360 degree overview of the data in the form of analytics provided by the Azure. The Platform provides you chart to understand the data and make some productive decisions on the basis of the analytics.

 

Summary

It’s very important to understand the performance of the application and identify the usage pattern to improve the application and application insight gives the 360 degree overview of the telemetry data. We will discuss about the features of the Application Insights in future posts.

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