DevOps and Application Insights

Application Insights is an amazingly powerful service offered by Microsoft Azure. While it can let you know many facts about your application without (literally) not writing much code, it also lets you search the collected telemetry.

These are great effort reduction tools (non-developer roles and sales folks -> pay attention) for teams which want to move to DevOps model. It is an awesome starting step for such teams as they can start to embrace the idea of collecting telemetry that helps in operations (and that too without writing any specific code yet). More so, it has a cute feature "Application Map" (still in preview) that lets you see the application's behavior in terms of its external dependencies like HTTP calls made to different URLs, usage of Azure Table Storage etc. This gives a great view to a person who has been handed over a new application to manage :).

One additional worry I have heard from operations folks is that your development team has logged excessive data and now my search queries are taking too much time and are not providing any help in any troubleshooting. Well, you can use "search" feature of Application Insight. AI also attaches (automatically) some tags to the logged information so that you can perform smart search right from day 1. Of course, there are APIs that your development (and operations) team need to get used to so that they can utilize it to a even greater benefit.

Get on the DevOps way. Now.