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Introduction to Application Insights - OpenTelemetry observability

  • Article

Azure Monitor Application Insights is an OpenTelemetry feature of Azure Monitor that offers application performance monitoring (APM) for live web applications. Integrating with OpenTelemetry (OTel) provides a vendor-neutral approach to collecting and analyzing telemetry data, enabling comprehensive observability of your applications.

A screenshot of the Azure Monitor Application Insights user interface displaying an application map.

Application Insights Experiences

Application Insights supports OpenTelemetry (OTel) to collect telemetry data in a standardized format across platforms. Integration with Azure services allows for efficient monitoring and diagnostics, improving application observability and performance.

Investigate

  • Application dashboard: An at-a-glance assessment of your application's health and performance.
  • Application map: A visual overview of application architecture and components' interactions.
  • Live metrics: A real-time analytics dashboard for insight into application activity and performance.
  • Transaction search: Trace and diagnose transactions to identify issues and optimize performance.
  • Availability view: Proactively monitor and test the availability and responsiveness of application endpoints.
  • Failures view: Identify and analyze failures in your application to minimize downtime.
  • Performance view: Review application performance metrics and potential bottlenecks.

Monitoring

  • Alerts: Monitor a wide range of aspects of your application and trigger various actions.
  • Metrics: Dive deep into metrics data to understand usage patterns and trends.
  • Diagnostic settings: Configure streaming export of platform logs and metrics to the destination of your choice.
  • Logs: Retrieve, consolidate, and analyze all data collected into Azure Monitoring Logs.
  • Workbooks: Create interactive reports and dashboards that visualize application monitoring data.

Usage

  • Users, sessions, and events: Determine when, where, and how users interact with your web app.
  • Funnels: Analyze conversion rates to identify where users progress or drop off in the funnel.
  • Flows: Visualize user paths on your site to identify high engagement areas and exit points.
  • Cohorts: Group users by shared characteristics to simplify trend identification, segmentation, and performance troubleshooting.

Code analysis

  • .NET Profiler: Capture, identify, and view performance traces for your application.
  • Code optimizations: Harness AI to create better and more efficient applications.
  • Snapshot debugger: Automatically collect debug snapshots when exceptions occur in .NET application

Logic model

The logic model diagram visualizes components of Application Insights and how they interact.

Diagram that shows the path of data as it flows through the layers of the Application Insights service.

Note

Firewall settings must be adjusted for data to reach ingestion endpoints. For more information, see Azure Monitor endpoint access and firewall configuration.

Supported languages

This section outlines supported scenarios.

For more information about instrumenting applications to enable Application Insights, see data collection basics.

Automatic instrumentation (enable without code changes)

Manual instrumentation

OpenTelemetry Distro

Client-side JavaScript SDK

Application Insights SDK (Classic API)

Supported platforms and frameworks

This section lists all supported platforms and frameworks.

Azure service integration (portal enablement, Azure Resource Manager deployments)

Logging frameworks

Export and data analysis

Unsupported Software Development Kits (SDKs)

Many community-supported Application Insights SDKs exist, but Microsoft only provides support for instrumentation options listed in this article.

Troubleshooting

For assistance with troubleshooting Application Insights, see our dedicated troubleshooting documentation.

Help and support

Azure technical support

For Azure support issues, open an Azure support ticket.

General Questions

Post general questions to the Microsoft Questions and Answers forum.

Coding Questions

Post coding questions to Stack Overflow by using an azure-application-insights tag.

Feedback Community

Leave product feedback for the engineering team in the Feedback Community.

Next steps