Monitoring Nodejs application with Azure Application Insights

Question

We are trying to monitor a nodejs application through azure application insights. We are following MS docs - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/nodejs even after going though we don't find much luck as we don't see any of the application metrics like users / sessions in application insights.

Please can you guide us on the same.

Answer 1

Quick Note:
If you are only missing some telemetry like users and sessions, make sure that you have client side code in addition to your server side code:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/usage-overview#send-telemetry-from-your-app

How to get things working
Here is the basic setup for a minimalistic Application Insights setup with Node.js:

1. Quickstart: Create a Node.js web app in Azure
   https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/quickstart-nodejs?pivots=platform-windows
2. Monitor your Node.js services and apps with Application Insights
   https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/nodejs

Key points:

• Be sure to run: npm install applicationinsights --save
• Be sure to include this in your code: let appInsights = require('applicationinsights');

For this, I modified the line of code above using a great blog from Kenichiro Nakamura
which has the following:

const appInsights = require("applicationinsights");  
appInsights.setup("<instrumentation_key>");  
appInsights.start();  

Kenichiro's blog is a great resource and I would recommend reading it in addition to the documentation:
https://dev.to/kenakamu/application-insights-sdk-for-node-js-3ki1

You will see something like this:

Troubleshooting
If things aren't working out the way you expect them to, there is a troubleshooting guide for Application Insights that addresses many of the common issues:

ASP.NET troubleshooting (includes some generic troubleshooting tips):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/asp-net-troubleshoot-no-data

If you are still running into issues, message us and let us know. We will ask you for some information so that we can further investigate things on our end.

Answer 2

Hi @Anonymous ,

I try out the sample with a 3rd party logging component Winston. I saw a lot of statement showing that I need to setup appInsight even before I start to load any 3rd party component. Below is a piece of my code sample:

1. imported the SDK
2. setup the instrument key
3. start the service for logging all the telemetry

But I encountered issue such as the outgoing port unreachable:

If I tried to add the endpoint URL:

I will still encounter the same error, but with a different outgoing port IP.
I look through the Microsoft doc and know that both IP is somehow related to the server outgoing port but I wasn't sure and understand what is the meaning of it. Would you mind explain a little bit of that.

I would like to seek some advice from you as I have been facing this issue for months and still couldn't get any breakthrough. A lot of sample looks straightforward as how I did it but non of them show any information regarding the outgoing port unreachable issue.

Thanks