1. End-to-end Application Performance Monitoring with Application Insights
Ervin Loh
Microsoft MVP (Visual Studio and Development Technologies)
K365labs Sdn Bhd

2. Presenter Ervin Loh (Visual Studio ALM MVP) Profile
Profile
Ervin Loh is currently the Application Lifecycle Management Program Manager at K365Labs Sdn Bhd. He is the user group lead of Application Lifecycle Management User Community, a charter of TechNation. He has also been presented with the Microsoft MVP award in the Visual Studio ALM competency for 8 consecutive years from 2009 through He owns more than 10 years experience in the IT industry where he obtained professional certifications from IREB, ISTQB, and Microsoft. He works on a variety of Application Lifecycle Management products. He is also active in the IT community space by contributing contents to Microsoft Malaysia's START.NET and Ultimate program workshops and talks in conferences, events and user groups such as TechEd, Softec, Tech Insights, MITPM, ALMUC, and MIND.

3. Agenda Overview Understanding Application Insights
Building successful apps & services
Understanding Application Insights
Ensure your apps are available, performing & succeeding
Getting started with Application Insights
Easy onboarding with Visual Studio & Status Monitor
Solving problems with Application Insights
Identify, triage & diagnose service failures & performance issues; Learn continuously
Real World Scenarios
Learn from some real world customer cases & scenarios

4. “By 2017, 94. 5% of downloads will be for free apps…Less than 0
“By 2017, 94.5% of downloads will be for free apps…Less than 0.01% of consumer mobile apps will be considered a financial success.”
- Gartner

5. Building successful apps is hard
Competition is fierce
User retention requires constant improvements to your apps and services
Constant evolution
Web services & mobile apps need to evolve rapidly to survive & grow
Continuous delivery is here
Most major services like Microsoft, Facebook, and others push update as often as every day
Success requires data-drive decision making
Making effective choices about your backlog requires deep understanding of your users behaviors and habits

6. Modern Application Lifecycle
Production
Development
Collaboration
BACKLOG
REQUIREMENTS
Monitor + Learn
Plan
Develop + Test
Release

7. Modern Application Lifecycle
Production
Development
Collaboration
BACKLOG
REQUIREMENTS
Monitor + Learn
Plan
Prioritize and validate investments based on real data
Continuous learning
Actionable and contextual info to resolve incidents
MTTR
Tools and processes
Collaboration
Quickly detect and triage application issues
MTTD
Develop + Test
Release

8. Application Insights Application Insights
3. Get 360° view of the application covering availability, performance & usage
1. Telemetry is collected at each tier: Mobile applications, server applications and browser
2. Telemetry arrives to Application Insights service where it is processed and stored

9. Understanding Application Insights
Is my application Available, Performing, Succeeding

10. “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness”
- Arthur Nielsen

11. What is application Insights all about?
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management service. It automatically detect performance anomalies. It includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app.

12. How does Application Insights work?
You install a small instrumentation package in your app, and set up an Application Insights resource in the Microsoft Azure portal. The instrumentation monitors your app and sends telemetry data to the portal. The application can run anywhere - it doesn't have to be hosted in Azure.

13. What does Application Insights monitor?
Request rates, response times, and failure rates - Find out which pages are most popular, at what times of day, and where your users are. See which pages perform best. If your response times and failure rates go high when there are more requests, then perhaps you have a resourcing problem.
Dependency rates, response times, and failure rates - Find out whether external services are slowing you down.
Exceptions - Analyse the aggregated statistics, or pick specific instances and drill into the stack trace and related requests. Both server and browser exceptions are reported.

14. What does Application Insights monitor? (continued)
Page views and load performance - reported by your users' browsers.
AJAX calls from web pages - rates, response times, and failure rates.
User and session counts.
Performance counters from your Windows or Linux server machines, such as CPU, memory, and network usage.
Host diagnostics from Docker or Azure.
Diagnostic trace logs from your app - so that you can correlate trace events with requests.

15. What does Application Insights monitor? (continued)
Custom events and metrics that you write yourself in the client or server code, to track business events such as items sold or games won.

16. What apps are supported by Application Insights?
ASP.NET web apps
Windows services
Windows Desktop apps
Java web apps
Docker apps
Node.js apps
SharePoint sites
and many more…

17. 1 2 3 4 Telemetry for 360° view Outside-in monitoring
URL pings and web tests from 8 global points of presence 2
Observed user behavior
How is the application being used? 3
app
Whatever the developer would like to send to Application Insights 4
platform
Observed application behavior
No coding required – service dependencies, queries, response time, exceptions, logs, etc.
infrastructure
Infrastructure performance

18. Identify & Triage
Diagnose & Solve
Application Insights
Learn & Improve

19. Demo
Application Insights portal tour

20. Getting Started with Application Insights
Easy onboarding with Visual Studio & Status Monitor

21. You need telemetry, but…
It is too hard
You don’t have time
You don’t want to create reports
It is hard to change
It is just for the marketing team

22. Application Insights is…
Easy to add
Easy to use
Part of the development process
App Insights is designed with the developer in mind!

23. Getting started for ASP.NET apps
From Visual Studio 2017/Visual Studio 2015 Update 3
Add during project creation or later from the Solution Explorer context menu
Add JS snippet to monitor web pages (only required for existing app)
Deploy app or run locally
Install Status Monitor for dependencies & perf counters
Add Web Tests if needed for Availability Monitoring
An application that is already deployed
Install Status Monitor on the server

24. Demo
Get started with Application Insights

25. Solving problems with Application Insights
Identify, triage & diagnose failures; Learn continuously

26. “The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value”
- Arthur Schopenhauer

27. Solve problems & learn continuously
Identify & Triage
Diagnose & Solve
Learn & Improve
Reduce ‘Mean Time to Detect’
Ensure service availability with 8 global points of presence
URL ping tests and rich multi- step web tests
Threshold based alerts on metrics and perf. counters
Real time alerts via & SMS
Reduce ‘Mean Time to Resolve’
Identify issues with request rate & dependency response times
Multi-dimensional analyses over custom & default metrics
Drill through exceptions & failed requests with traces & runtime telemetry
Understand key adoption trends
Prioritise investments & support specific client environments
Custom event instrumentation & client page views
Correlate usage with perf. telemetry for 360° view

28. Reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
Problems
Visibility to application health
Visibility to application outages to minimize customer impact
Hard to get information to determine impact of issue
Solutions
Automatic alerts whenever your application is not responding according to your thresholds
Actionable information to triage issues
360° view to your application health
Value
Learn about issues before your customers complain
Minimize outages and customer impact

29. Reduce Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
Problems
Uncover root cause of production issues
Quickly resolve code problems detected in production
Solutions
Detect if the problem is your code or your dependencies.
Incident management workflows to integrate developers and operations.
Actionable production diagnostics
Value
Low Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
Improved communication between dev and ops teams
Increased user satisfaction

30. Improve with continuous learning
Problems
Lack of information to prioritize future investments
Solutions
Access to customer usage data to help you make informed decisions
Value
Continuous learning

31. Demo
Solve Problems & Learn Continuously

32. Real World Scenarios
Learn from some real world customer cases & scenarios

33. Microsoft uses Application Insights!
Microsoft uses Application Insights for tracking adoption, prioritizing investments and maintaining live site & data platform
Microsoft instruments pipeline to track overall business metrics and feature usage workflows
Microsoft uses Application Insights for Live Site to continuously track availability & performance

34. Microsoft Game Studios
Game Studio: CMS & Commerce Service
Game Service Scenarios
Predict scale
Investigate real data
Respond to service incidents
Use App Insights for Availability, Perf. & Usage
Improving Service Engineering
Invest in operational intelligence early
Treat it as a corollary to unit testing
Use throughout your application lifecycle

35. The importance of telemetry
‘Plant vs Zombies 2’ mobile game was initially released in Australia & New Zealand
PopCap soft launched in those markets because those regions are much smaller compared to the US and Europe
They aimed to test the backend in those markets to prevent unlikely crashing when the game is launched in the major markets
It was deemed necessary as it could help make sure server capacity, in-game shop quality, and cloud saving capabilities are in best conditions before the release

36. Closing Thoughts…

37. Data Privacy & Security
Your data is for your eyes only; Application Insights will never make your data available to advertisers, partners or 3rd parties
Security
With Application Insights you can be confident that your data is secure in Microsoft’s Azure data centres
Learn More at

38. In conclusion…
Performance
Usage
Availability

39. DevOps Resources Resources for IT Ops http://aka.ms/devopstl
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40. Resources TechNet Microsoft Learning Microsoft MSDN Microsoft
Resources for IT Professionals
Microsoft Certification & Training Resources
MSDN
Microsoft
Resources for Developers

41. Q&A