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Profile production applications in Azure with Application Insights Profiler

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Diagnosing your application's performance issues can be difficult, especially when running on a production environment in the dynamic cloud. Slow responses in your application could be caused by infrastructure, framework, or application code handling the request in the pipeline.

With Application Insights Profiler, you can capture, identify, and view performance traces for your application running in Azure, regardless of the scenario. The Profiler trace process occurs automatically, at scale, and doesn't negatively affect your users. The Profiler identifies:

  • The median, fastest, and slowest response times for each web request made by your customers.
  • The "hot" code path spending the most time handling a particular web request.

Enable the Profiler on all your Azure applications to gather data with the following triggers:

  • Sampling trigger: Starts Profiler randomly about once an hour for two minutes.
  • CPU trigger: Starts Profiler when the CPU usage percentage is over 80 percent.
  • Memory trigger: Starts Profiler when memory usage is above 80 percent.

Each of these triggers can be configured, enabled, or disabled.

Overhead and sampling algorithm

Profiler randomly runs two minutes per hour on each virtual machine hosting applications with Profiler enabled. When Profiler is running, it adds from 5 percent to 15 percent CPU overhead to the server.

Supported in Profiler

Profiler works with .NET applications deployed on the following Azure services. View specific instructions for enabling Profiler for each service type in the following links.

Compute platform .NET (>= 4.6) .NET Core
Azure App Service Yes Yes
Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets for Windows Yes Yes
Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets for Linux No Yes
Azure Cloud Services Yes Yes
Azure Container Instances for Windows No Yes
Azure Container Instances for Linux No Yes
Kubernetes No Yes
Azure Functions Yes Yes
Azure Service Fabric Yes Yes

Note

You can also use the Java Profiler for Azure Monitor Application Insights, currently in preview.

If you've enabled Profiler but aren't seeing traces, see the Troubleshooting guide.

Limitations

  • Data retention: The default data retention period is five days.
  • Profiling web apps:
    • Although you can use Profiler at no extra cost, your web app must be hosted in the basic tier of the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service, at minimum.
    • You can attach only one profiler to each web app.

Next steps

Learn how to enable Profiler on your Azure service: