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Manage alerts, blameless retrospectives and a just culture - Training
Manage alerts, blameless retrospectives and a just culture
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Note
You can migrate your Application Insight resources to alerts-based smart detection (preview). The migration creates alert rules for the different smart detection modules. Once created, you can manage and configure these rules just like any other Azure Monitor alert rules. You can also configure action groups for these rules, thus enabling multiple methods of taking actions or triggering notification on new detections.
For more information on the migration process, see Smart Detection Alerts migration.
Application Insights automatically analyzes the performance of your web application, and can warn you about potential problems.
This feature requires no special setup, other than configuring your app for Application Insights for your supported language. It's active when your app generates enough telemetry.
Application Insights has detected that the performance of your application has degraded in one of these ways:
To establish a baseline of normal performance, smart detection requires at least eight days of sufficient telemetry volume. After your application has been running for that period, significant anomalies will result in a notification.
No, a notification doesn't mean that your app definitely has a problem. It's simply a suggestion about something you might want to look at more closely.
The notifications include diagnostic information. Here's an example:
Triage. The notification shows you how many users or how many operations are affected. This information can help you assign a priority to the problem.
Scope. Is the problem affecting all traffic, or just some pages? Is it restricted to particular browsers or locations? This information can be obtained from the notification.
Diagnose. Often, the diagnostic information in the notification will suggest the nature of the problem. For example, if response time slows down when request rate is high, it may indicate that your server or dependencies are beyond their capacity.
Otherwise, open the Performance pane in Application Insights where you find .NET Profiler data. If exceptions are thrown, you can also try the Snapshot Debugger.
Smart detection notifications are enabled by default. They are sent to users that have Monitoring Reader and Monitoring Contributor access to the subscription in which the Application Insights resource resides. To change the default notification, either click Configure in the email notification, or open Smart detection settings in Application Insights.
Emails about smart detection performance anomalies are limited to one email per day per Application Insights resource. The email will be sent only if there is at least one new issue that was detected on that day. You won't get repeats of any message.
So, Microsoft staff look at my data?
Do you analyze all the data collected by Application Insights?
What types of application does this detection work for?
Can I create my own anomaly detection rules or customize existing rules?
How often is the analysis done?
Does this replace metric alerts?
If I don't do anything in response to a notification, will I get a reminder?
I lost the email. Where can I find the notifications in the portal?
Slow and failed responses are one of the biggest frustrations for web site users, as you know from your own experience. So, it's important to address the issues.
First, does it matter? If a page is always slow to load, but only 1% of your site's users ever have to look at it, maybe you have more important things to think about. However, if only 1% of users open it, but it throws exceptions every time, that might be worth investigating.
Use the impact statement, such as affected users or % of traffic, as a general guide. Be aware that it may not be telling the whole story. Gather other evidence to confirm.
Consider the parameters of the issue. If it's geography-dependent, set up availability tests including that region: there might be network issues in that area.
Where is the problem? Is the server slow to respond, is the page too long, or does the browser need too much work to display it?
Open the Browsers metric pane. The segmented display of browser page load time shows where the time is going.
There's a web full of advice on improving your server responses and page load times, so we won't try to repeat it all here. Here are a few tips that you probably already know about, just to get you thinking:
The response time degradation notification tells you:
Modern applications often adopt a micro services design approach, which in many cases rely heavily on external services. For example, if your application relies on some data platform, or on a critical services provider such as Azure AI services.
Example of dependency degradation notification:
Notice that it tells you:
Application Insights finds performance issues that might only affect some portion of your users, or only affect users in some cases. For example, if a page loads slower on a specific browser type compared to others, or if a particular server handles requests more slowly than other servers. It can also discover problems that are associated with combinations of properties, such as slow page loads in one geographical area for clients using particular operating system.
Anomalies like these are hard to detect just by inspecting the data, but are more common than you might think. Often they only surface when your customers complain. By that time, it's too late: the affected users are already switching to your competitors!
Currently, our algorithms look at page load times, request response times at the server, and dependency response times.
You don't have to set any thresholds or configure rules. Machine learning and data mining algorithms are used to detect abnormal patterns.
Click the links to open Metric Explorer to view reports, filtered by the time and properties of the slow performing set.
Modify the time range and filters to explore the telemetry.
These diagnostic tools help you inspect the telemetry from your app:
Smart detection is automatic. But maybe you'd like to set up some more alerts?
Training
Module
Manage alerts, blameless retrospectives and a just culture - Training
Manage alerts, blameless retrospectives and a just culture