So what is Application Insights? Here is the blurb from the Visual Studio website:
Application Insights is a new service in Visual Studio Online that enables you to get a 360 degree view of your entire application. It helps you keep your application available and performing, and gives you insight to make data-driven improvements. Whether running in the cloud or in your own datacenter, and from development through production, Application Insights can help you deliver your applications faster and with more confidence.
Essentially, you can use Application Insights to monitor your web applications, and gather performance as well as other telemetry data about how your application is used. There is a lot more to it than that, which we will explore as we dive deeper into the product.
Caveat: Application Insights is current in limited preview as of this writing. Participation is expanding slowly, but remember things may change or be different from what this blog post outlines.
Because the product is in limited preview, you need a code to start working with it. Brian Harry seems to be doling out codes every once in a while, so I recommend checking his blog regularly. I’m working to see if I can get some codes to give away here at ALM Rocks!. Keeping my fingers crossed on that.
On the home page of your VisualStudio.com website (in my case, almrocks.visualstudio.com), you should see a new Blue Box – Try Application Insights (Figure 1).
Figure 1 – Try Application Insights button
This takes you to an overview page that shows you an example of an analytics dashboard, and prompts you to enter your invitation code (Figure 2).
Figure 2- Enter your invitation code
You then go to a page (Figure 3) where you can add a new application to monitor. By default, it is assuming I’m running a .NET web application on a Windows server. This page will walk me through the steps of how to download and use the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA). The Logo at the bottom of this screenshot is actually a How-To video, from our own Chuck Sterling, on how to get started with the MMA.
For me, I don’t want to install MMA yet to monitor that way. Instead, I want to see if I can instrument up my website (https://almrocks.com). So, under Step 1, I’m going to click the click here link to see how to configure this for other applications
Figure 3 – Getting started by adding an application to monitor
Now I’m asked would I like to collect data from a server component (Figure 4). I’m going to guess that since my website is hosted I can’t do that (but I could be wrong), so I’m going to click No. Notice that once again we have a video (Hi Chuck) to help us understand more about what is happening.
Figure 4 – Do you want to collect data from a server component
By clicking No, a second question appears, asking me what type of application I have, a web site or a Windows Phone 8 app. (Figure 5)
Figure 5 – Select What type of application you have
I select Web site. App Insights thinks it has enough information to help me set things up. So I’m clicking the “Click here to show instructions” link in Figure 6.
Figure 6 – All the information has been provided to give me instructions on what to do next.
This is cool. I’m prompted to name my application. I enter ALMRocks! as the name and click the Create button. (Figure 7).
Figure 7 – Name your application
This then gives me some Javascript code (blocked out, for no reason other than it was fun) to insert into my website (Figure 8). Dang, now I have to go figure out where to put this in my website. Again, there is a video at the bottom of the screen to help you out if you get stuck (I’m starting to see a trend here).
Figure 8 – Add the javascript to your site to start gathering data
Ok, I think I found the correct place to add it, and I’m seeing the code on the different pages of my website. Now I just need to wait to see if the data starts rolling in.
Within about 30 minutes I had data starting to flow into my console. Below are a few screenshots of some of the information being gathered.
And this is without any tuning or digging deeper into the product. I can’t wait to dive into this in more detail.
What do you think?
