Analyze telemetry of a canvas app using Application Insights

Article
12/16/2022
6 minutes to read

You can connect your app with Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor. Application Insights includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app.

With your app connected to Applications Insights, you can collect information to help you drive better business decisions and improve the quality of your apps.

In this quickstart, you'll instrument a canvas app called Kudos. This helps you explore, discover telemetry concepts, and apply them to your own canvas apps. The sample Kudos app is part of a suite of employee engagement apps available for download from Employee Experience Starter Kit.

Prerequisites

You must have access to the Azure portal.
You must have the permissions to create Azure resources.

Optional

Download and install the Kudos app from Employee Experience Starter Kit. You can also use an existing app instead.

Create an Application Insights resource

Before you can send telemetry for an app, you'll need to create an Application Insights resource to store the events.

Sign in to the Azure portal.
Search for Application Insights:
Create an Application Insights resource:
Enter the appropriate values and select Review + create. For more details, read Create an Application Insights resource.
After the Application Insights instance is created, you'll see the instance overview. Copy the Instrumentation Key. You'll need this key to configure your app.

Connect your app to Application Insights

Sign in to Power Apps.
Select Apps from the left navigation. From the list of apps, select the Kudos app and then select Edit:

Note

You can also create a new app or edit any existing app instead.
Select the App object from the left navigation tree view and paste the Instrumentation Key:
Save and Publish your app.
Play the published app and browse through different screens.

As you browse through different screens, events are automatically logged to Application Insights, including the usage details such as:

Where the app is accessed from.
Which devices are used.
The browser types used.

Important

You must play the published app to send events to Application Insights. Events are not sent to Application Insights when you preview the app in Power Apps Studio.

View events in Application Insights

Sign in to the Azure portal and open the Application Insights resource you created earlier.
Scroll down in the left navigation pane and select Users under the Usage section.
Note

Users view shows usage details of the app, such as:
- Number of users who viewed the app.
- Number of sessions by the users for the app.
- Number of events logged for the app.
- Operating systems and browser version details of the users.
- Region and location of the users.
For more details, read Users, sessions, and events analysis in Application Insights.
Select one of the user sessions to drill into specific details. You can see information such as the session length and the screens visited:
Select the Events view in left navigation pane under the Usage section. You can see a summary of all the screens viewed across all app sessions:

Tip

Some of the additional Application Insights features you can use are:

Create custom trace events

You can write custom traces directly to Application Insights and start to analyze information specific to your scenario. Trace function allows you to collect:

Granular usage information for controls on the screens.
Which specific users are accessing your app.
What errors occur.

Tracing can also help diagnose issues because you can send a trail of information as your users browse through your app and perform different actions.

There are three severities for trace messages when sending custom trace information to Application Insights from your app:

Information
Warning
Error

Depending on your scenario, you can choose to send a trace message with the appropriate severity. You can query the data and take specific actions based on the message severity.

Note

If you are logging any personnel data, you will need to consider any data compliance obligations, such as GDPR, that you might also need to implement.

You'll now update your app and create a new component to collect feedback on each screen of the app. You'll write the events to Application Insights.

Sign in to Power Apps.
Select Apps from the left navigation. From the list of apps, select the Kudos app and then select Edit.

Note

You can also create a new app or edit any existing app instead.
Select the Components option on the Tree view:
Select New component, and then resize the width to 200 and height to 75:
Select Insert from the menu and then select Icons to add Emoji - Frown and Emoji - Smile:
Select New custom property to create a custom property:
Enter property Name and Display name such as FeedbackSceen.
Enter property Description.
Select Property type as Input and Data type as Screen:

Note

Input property allows you to capture the screen name and its component so that you can log this information to Application Insights.
Select the component on the Tree View, select More actions (...), and then select Rename to rename the component with a meaningful name such as FeedbackComponent.
Select the icons, select More actions (...), and then select Rename to rename the icons with meaningful names, such as FrownIcon and SmileIcon.

Select FrownIcon, select the OnSelect property, and then enter the following expression in the formula bar:

Trace(
   "App Feedback",
   TraceSeverity.Information,
       {
         UserName: User().FullName,
         UserEmail: User().Email,
         Screen: FeedbackComponent.FeedbackScreen.Name,
         FeedbackValue: "-1"
       }
     );
Notify("Thanks for you feedback!");

Frown icon formula.

Note

The formula expression sends UserName, UserEmail, Screen, and the Feedback (with the value -1) to Application Insights.

Select SmileIcon, select the OnSelect property, and then enter the following expression in the formula bar:

Trace(
   "App Feedback",
   TraceSeverity.Information,
       {
         UserName: User().FullName,
         UserEmail: User().Email,
         Screen: FeedbackComponent.FeedbackScreen.Name,
         FeebackValue: "1"
       }
     );
Notify("Thanks for you feedback!");

Add the component to one of the screens in your app:
Select Save and then select Publish to save and publish your app.
Play the published app, and send a smile and a frown feedback from your screens.

Important

You must play the published app to send events to Application Insights. Events are not sent to Application Insights when you preview the app in Power Apps Studio.

Analyze data in Application Insights

You can now begin to analyze the data you sent using the Trace function from your app in Application Insights.

Sign in to the Azure portal and open the Application Insights resource you created earlier:
Select Logs under Monitoring from the left navigation pane:
Enter the following query and select Run. The feedback received from your app is returned:
```
traces
| where message == "App Feedback"
| order by timestamp
```
Select a row in the results and expand the customDimensions field.

The values for Screen, UserName, UserEmail, and FeedbackValue for the OnSelect event of the smile or frown icon in your component have been recorded.
There are also some additional values recorded for each event sent to Application Insights, such as the appId, appName, and appSessionId.

With the following example query, you can extend the properties of the JSON custom dimensions and project the columns in the results view.

traces
    | extend customdims = parse_json(customDimensions)
    | where message == "App Feedback"
    | project timestamp
        , message
        , AppName = customdims.['ms-appName']
        , AppId = customdims.['ms-appId']
        , FeedbackFrom = customdims.UserEmail
        , Screen = customdims.Screen
        , FeedbackValue = customdims.FeedbackValue
    | order by timestamp desc

Extend customDimensions query.

Tip

Log queries are extremely powerful. You can use them to join multiple tables, aggregate large amounts of data, and perform complex operations. For more information, read Log queries.

Monitor unhandled errors (experimental)

[This section contains pre-release documentation and is subject to change.]

Important

This is an experimental feature.
Experimental features aren’t meant for production use and may have restricted functionality. These features are available before an official release so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.

Errors occurring during app runtime cannot always be anticipated and planned for. Unhandled Power Fx formula errors are reported to users as banner messages during runtime. These errors can also be reported to Application Insights to help understand frequency and severity without reliance on app users reporting issues. More proactive measures can also be put in place by setting up real-time alerts when runtime errors occur.

Enable error passing to Application Insights

You'll need to enable the setting that allows Power Apps to pass the unhandled runtime errors to Azure Application Insights.

Warning

Enabling this setting may incur additional costs related to the storage of Application Insights logs.

To enable error passing, go to Settings > Upcoming features > Experimental > Pass errors to Azure Application Insights while keeping your canvas app open for editing.

Enable Pass errors to Azure Application Insights setting.

Upon publishing the app, unhandled runtime errors are now reported to Application Insights.

Error events in Application Insights

Unhandled Power Fx errors experienced by end users at app runtime will be reported to the traces table. Unhandled errors can be identified and distinguished from other error events by the event message "Unhandled error". The "severityLevel" dimension of these events will be 3 (TraceSeverity.Error).

Detailed error messages are provided in the "errors" dimension of the customDimension property. In situations where multiple errors occurred during the same operation, these errors will be consolidated in the "errors" dimension of a single trace event. These error messages are the same as reported in Monitor during a live debug session.

This example query identifies unhandled errors and expands all error messages included in the trace event:

traces
    | where message == "Unhandled error"
    | extend customdims = parse_json(customDimensions)
    | extend errors = parse_json(tostring(customdims.['errors']))
    | mv-expand errors
    | project timestamp
        , itemId //unique identifier for the trace event
        , AppName = customdims.['ms-appName']
        , AppId = customdims.['ms-appId']
        , errors = errors.['Message']
    | order by timestamp desc

Sample output for example query.

Correlation tracing (experimental)

[This section contains pre-release documentation and is subject to change.]

Important

This is an experimental feature.
Experimental features aren’t meant for production use and may have restricted functionality. These features are available before an official release so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.

Connections to external data and services are fundamental to most apps. Correlation tracing enables the generation and propagation of context information to enable the joining of telemetry across a canvas app and its connections (see limitations below). As an example, your app may call into a custom connector that in turn calls an Azure Function or other REST API. Correlation tracing allows you to correlate actions taken within the app with the underlying API calls across tiers. This can be useful in troubleshooting.

Canvas app correlation tracing is an implementation of context tracing follows W3C specification.

Enable correlation tracing

Warning

Enabling this setting may incur additional costs related to the storage of Application Insights logs.

To enable the correlation tracing feature, go to Settings > Upcoming features > Experimental > Enable Azure Application Insights correlation tracing while keeping your canvas app open for editing.

Enable Azure Application Insights correlation tracing.

Upon publishing the app, correlation tracing will now be enabled in Application Insights.

Limitations

Correlation tracing is currently enabled for custom connectors. Other connector types are not yet supported.
HTTP requests are only captured in Application Insights if the connected service is also instrumented with Application Insights.

Using correlation tracing

When enabled, correlation tracing adds a new telemetry event in the dependencies table of the canvas app's Application Insights instance. This event is recorded at the time a response from a network call (for supported connectors) is received. Dependency events capture details of the network call, including the request and response headers, response status code, and duration of the call.

Sample event logged in the dependencies table.

If the connected service is also instrumented with Application Insights, an additional telemetry event capturing the request is generated in the requests table of the service's Application Insights instance. Some Azure Services, such as Azure Functions can be instrumented without any coding from the Azure portal. Both the canvas app (or multiple apps) and connected services can be instrumented with the same Application Insights instance.

Sample event logged in the requests table.

Network calls for supported connectors can be joined with other telemetry on the "operation_Id" dimension. This example query shows a network call being made alongside trace events emitted during an app session.

traces | union dependencies | union requests | union pageViews | union customEvents
| project timestamp
    , itemType
    , name
    , operation_Name
    , message
    , severityLevel
    , customDimensions
    , operation_Id
    , operation_ParentId
| where operation_Id == "0a7729e3e83c4e4d93cb4f51149f73b9" //placeholder operation_Id, replace
| order by timestamp asc

Sample output for the earlier example query.

Export data to Power BI

You can export your Application Insights data and query results to Power BI for analysis and data presentation.

Sign in to the Azure portal and open the Application Insights resource you created earlier:
Select Logs under Monitoring from the left navigation pane:
From the log analytics query window, select the Export drop-down menu.
Select the Export to Power BI (M query) option. This will download a Power BI query file to your machine:
Open the downloaded file in a text editor and copy the query to the clipboard.
Open Power BI.
Select the Get Data drop-down menu in the Home ribbon and then select Blank query:
In the query window, select Advanced Editor. Paste the query from step 5 into the window, select Done, and then select Close & Apply:
You can also create charts and visualizations in Power BI to represent feedback received in your app, as well as make data-based decisions and actions.

Default Trace event context and dimensions

A set of default dimensions is also added to the customDimensions property on each Trace event. These dimensions can be used to identify the application and application sessions the events occurred in. If you log additional custom data using the trace function, they'll also appear in the custom dimensions.

Dimension Name	Represents
ms-appId	The Application ID of the app that sent the event.
ms-appname	The Application name of the app that sent the event.
ms-appSessionId	The application session ID. This value may not be populated is some scenarios. When available, this value overrides the standard Application Insights sessionID dimension.
ms-tenantID	The unique identifier of the tenant where the application is published.
ms-environmentId	The name of the environment where the application is published.
userId	A unique identifier for the end-user associated with the session.
ms-duration	An imputed value measuring the time it takes for a user to navigate from one screen to another. This value overrides the standard Application Insights PageView duration dimension.
sessionId	A session ID that can be used to correlate all events associated with a single application session. This value will always be present and is recommended for understanding unique session count. This value is taken from the player's session ID and is shown when viewing the session details while playing the app. Session ID might sometimes get a default, random, and unique Application Insights generated value. This default value isn't reliable and doesn't correlate with any app-specific parameters.
Duration	An imputed value measuring the time it takes for a user to navigate from one screen to another. This value is the same as the duration reported by the ms-duration dimension.
ms-isTest	Indicates if the session is associated with the Test Studio test runner.
ms-currentScreenName	The name of the page an end user is navigating from (present for page navigation events).
ms-targetScreenName	The name of the page an end user is navigating to (present for page navigation events).

Unsupported scenarios

Application Insights doesn't support the following scenarios.

Offline and mobile apps/player events (both Android and iOS) aren't captured.
Network requests and errors aren't captured.
GCC and non-public clouds aren't supported.

Analyze telemetry of a canvas app using Application Insights

Prerequisites

Optional

Create an Application Insights resource

Connect your app to Application Insights

View events in Application Insights

Create custom trace events

Analyze data in Application Insights

Monitor unhandled errors (experimental)

Enable error passing to Application Insights

Error events in Application Insights

Correlation tracing (experimental)

Enable correlation tracing

Limitations

Using correlation tracing

Export data to Power BI

Default Trace event context and dimensions

Unsupported scenarios

Feedback

Additional resources

Additional resources