This morning Visual Studio 2015 was released with a lot of great features to support every phase of your development cycle. If you haven’t already, check out the Visual Studio 2015 release page. Among these features is Visual Studio Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio.

What is Application Insights?

Application Insights is an extensible analytics solution that monitors the performance and usage of your live application. It works with both web and stand-alone applications on a wide variety of platforms – not just Windows devices and ASP.NET web apps, but iOS, Android, and J2EE as well. (We’ll focus here on how you use it as a Visual Studio dev, but it’s worth mentioning that it works uniformly across the board.)

Application Insights is aimed at the development team. Use it to detect and diagnose performance and availability issues and crashes.  Analyze usage patterns and measure the success of each new feature. We’ve designed it to be built in to your devOps cycle, gathering data about each new release so that you can plan the next.

Getting started with Application Insights using Visual Studio

Getting started to Application Insights from Visual Studio is super simple.

You’ll need a Microsoft Azure subscription to which you have write access.  It’s free to sign up, and you can choose the free pricing tier of Application Insights.

If you’re creating a new project, just ensure the Application Insights checkbox is checked.

Or, if you have an existing project, choose Add Application Insights in the project context menu, or from the Connected Services dialog.

These commands add our SDK to your project, and create a resource in Application Insights where the data is stored, analyzed and displayed to you.

You can use Application Insights in debug, test and production.

What’s new in the Application Insights Tools in Visual Studio 2015?

Supporting new project types:

• ASP.NET 5
• Windows Apps (coming soon)
• Windows 8.1 Universal

Application Insights in Visual Studio Connected Services

You can now find Application Insights in the Connected Services dialog in Visual Studio (Project->Add->Connected Services).

Finished adding AI to my project, now what?

After adding Application Insights to a new or existing project, a link to getting started help will appear under the Project’s Service Reference folder.

I don’t see the Application Insights options on my project

For some types of project, configuration with Application Insights isn’t fully automated. But you can still add Application Insights manually. See the full range of supported platforms.

Application Insights Service Updates

The Service Updates page tells you about the new features and improvements that are happening all the time to Application Insights.

Comments/feedback

We are very interested in hearing about how we are doing, so please submit questions and issues to Forums, bugs to Connect (select Application Insights), and suggestions to User Voice.