Telemetry with Application Insights overview

Note

Features in this article are powered by the standard harness, which uses the billing options described in Licensing for agents powered by the standard harness. Learn how to access standard features in Access standard agents and agent flows.

In addition to the native analytics features within Copilot Studio, you can send telemetry data to Application Insights. Copilot Studio supports telemetry at different scopes, depending on whether you need diagnostics for a single agent or centralized observability in OpenTelemetry-aligned format across agents in an environment.

Important

Application Insights is a feature of Azure Monitor, an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) tool that you can use to monitor your live applications. It requires a subscription to Microsoft Azure.

Telemetry scopes

You can collect Copilot Studio telemetry in Application Insights at two scopes: Agent-level telemetry and Environment-level telemetry (preview). The choice determines the monitoring boundary, ownership model, telemetry shape, and the level of observability available for agentic scenarios.

  • Agent-level telemetry is configured for an individual Copilot Studio agent. The maker or development team responsible for that agent owns it. This export option doesn't include any OpenTelemetry-aligned spans.

  • Environment-level telemetry is configured centrally for a Copilot Studio environment and is typically owned by administrators, platform teams, or Center of Excellence teams. It provides centralized observability across Copilot Studio agents in the environment using a trace or span-based model aligned with the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions for GenAI, the emerging industry-standard for observing modern distributed and agentic systems. This model makes it better suited for monitoring modern agentic workloads, especially agent invocations, tool execution, outputs, and dependencies across agents.

Scope comparison

The following table compares agent-level and environment-level telemetry in Application Insights:

Area Agent-level telemetry Environment-level telemetry
Configuration scope Configured separately for each agent Configured once for the environment
Configuration owner Maker or developer responsible for the agent Administrator, platform team, tenant admin, or Center of Excellence team
Privilege level Requires access to the specific agent configuration Requires tenant-level Power Platform administrator or Dynamics 365 administrator privileges, plus an administrator role in the Dataverse environment
Primary audience Makers and development teams that need agent-specific diagnostics Administrators and platform teams responsible for governance, operations, and centralized observability
Operating model Decentralized diagnostics per agent or solution team Centralized observability across agents in the environment
Telemetry model Event-based telemetry Trace or span-based telemetry aligned with OpenTelemetry concepts
Best suited for Message activity, topic events, custom events, and single-agent troubleshooting Agent invocations, tool execution, outputs, dependencies, and cross-agent monitoring
Primary Application Insights tables customEvents dependencies
OpenTelemetry alignment No Yes