Challenge 11 – Monitoring: Application Insights

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Introduction

To bring our DevOps journey full circle we need to understand what is happening in our deployed environments. It is too late for us to find out about a problem, by the time our users are complaining about it. It is also imperative to know about not only the performance of the site, but also the impact positive or negative a feature has had on our users. Please take a moment to review the articles below to gain a better understanding of the importance of monitoring and Application Insights, one of the tools we have to make it easy in Azure.

1. What is Monitoring?
2. What is Application Insights?

Challenge

In this challenge we will look at some of the telemetry that has already been collected by our running instance from Application Insights, injected into the Azure resources created back in our earlier Infrastructure-as-code challenge.

• Review the container-webapp-template.json ARM template. Find where the Application Insights node was created and note how the Web App was configured to send its logs there.

• Create a dashboard in the Azure Portal to provide a summary of the status of our site. (hint)

• Implement an outside in availability test for the homepage of your site (hint)

Success Criteria

• You should understand the importance of monitoring and some of the basic features offered by Application Insights.

  • NOTE: We are just scratching the surface of what is offered in Azure Monitoring, if you are interested in learning more there is a full What the Hack focused on Azure Monitoring.

Advanced Challenges (optional)

• If you integrated Azure DevOps Boards with GitHub, link your Application Insights instance with your Azure Boards instance (hint)

• Using the failures feature of Application Insights find an exception that happened on your site. Using the link you created in the last step, open a work item to resolve that exception.

  • NOTE: If your site doesn’t have any exceptions, you can create one easily by trying to go to a page that doesn’t exist.

  • NOTE: It takes a min or two after an event happens for it to make its way to Application Insights and for it to be indexed so you can see it in the portal.

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