Study the performance of your Apps with Azure App Insights
The era of Apps
Applications have become our way of operating day after day and of accessing all services. Its development and use in recent years have changed many concepts about what users were looking for.
As you can imagine, all these applications have a lot of work behind them, both before their deployment and during their operational time. When we present them, we usually talk about the design, the services it offers, or the speed of response. However, in general, we do not usually talk about the study of the metrics that make our Apps a success, or a failure.
It is very important to monitor the status of an App, both at the public and operational levels. These statistics, these data, are what will help us make the necessary decisions in the future. Not registering them can cause real headaches for our entire company: we won’t know what works and what doesn’t, and we won’t know why the app has failed at critical moments.
Why do I need to know the status of my Apps?
With this information, you can imagine how important it is to have an app for our services whenever possible.
Once we have it, of course, we have to monitor its performance and make sure it works properly. First and foremost, we need to avoid frustrating ourselves, our developers, and our audience. All this involves constantly monitoring the data. We can obtain and ensure that there are no obstacles for anyone.
There are many services/applications designed to study the effectiveness of the applications you use, but we will recommend one of the expanding services of the moment and which we have already told you about before. We refer to Microsoft Azure and its monitoring section, Azure Monitor.
So what is Azure App Insights?
If you’ve read our previous article, you should already know some of the capabilities of Azure. Seattle Technicians’ cloud computing service is one of their strong bets on the imminent digitalization, and they are not skimping on services to include shortly.
In short, App Insights belongs to the Azure Monitor set. Azure Monitor, as Microsoft explains, helps you visualize the performance of your applications created through Azure (and external ones). A support tool to detect and prevent problems in the future, nothing more and nothing less.
App Insights, more specifically, collects various types of data from the applications with which it is linked, stores them, and sends them to you for further study. Your data access connection has a minimal impact on your application’s workload, so it won’t affect your overall application performance at any time.
What data can I analyze with App Insights?
We could split the data provided by Azure App Insights into two segments.
The first segment could be called metrics (also called Microsoft). In this section, we include all the statistics on the “success” of our app among users: logins, views, external requests,… This data is used to understand how our users use the application and what changes we need to make.
The second segment is the performance data of the app, as it operates on a day-to-day basis. We include data such as response speed, latency at different traffic levels, errors, and exceptions.
Both segments, on the one hand, provide vital information about our application to help us be more proactive in the face of challenges that may arise or to be faster in responding to what is not working.
The most important thing is also the ease with which we can study this data once we receive it. As it should be, Azure Monitor and App Insights allow you to consume everything collected with services outside of Azure: with Visual Studio and Power BI from Microsoft, and even with third parties through the Rest API.
Is Azure App Insights necessary?
As the saying goes, no one knows better what you need than yourself. But if you already have Azure among your work tools, it wouldn’t hurt to take advantage of it.
Thanks to Azure Monitor, you will centralize all your data and its monitoring in a single suite. Speed, accessibility (even for external apps), and simplicity, all in one. Being Azure, you can also combine the data to view it from other Microsoft and third-party environments.
What do we tell you? That is an incredibly useful and easily accessible service if you already have Azure elements and will help you maximize the performance of your applications and react as soon as possible and implement the solutions you need.
In short, App Insights is a “must” for any business. If you want to know more about it, here is the official Microsoft document.