We’ve made a slew of performance and stability improvements to Application Insights in the past few months, aiming to make your experience lightning fast and highly reliable. We’re improving almost on a daily basis while Application Insights is still in Preview. As part of our refactoring, we’re moving some data and will need to impose a small restriction.

Temporary reduction in search query period

What is going to happen?

• On October 28, 2015 (Wednesday Afternoon, Pacific Time), we will temporarily reduce the period over which you can perform search queries. Even if you’re using the Standard or Premium pricing tiers, you’ll find you can’t perform a search query that goes back more than seven days.

• Metrics Explorer will continue to provide all aggregated data, down to the one-minute granularity according to the pricing plan.

Why?

• We are doing this as a planned part of our program of improvements. We are refactoring our data storage approach, serving search and metrics queries from different indexes to make significant improvements in performance.

Is this temporary?

• Yes. The standard data retention times will be restored over the next few weeks. You’ll immediately notice improvements in performance of queries.

Continuing improvements

We’re sorry for any inconvenience we might cause by this temporary measure. The change is part of a continuing program of improvements. Here are some of our achievements over the past few months:

• UI Performance: Page and query load has become twice as fast. We’ve improved caching, pre-fetching, reduced serialization/de-serialization of data volume, code refactoring, query performance, asynchronous calls, UI geo-distribution, and more.

• UI Reliability: Part load of Application Insights components have achieved crucial reliability improvements with which we believe that you can depend on the service ever more confidently.

• Data Scalability: Traffic growth has doubled in recent months requiring more capacity. Additional data collection end points have been deployed in many different data centers around the world and an additional processing data center has been added in South Central US.

And of course, we’ve been using Application Insights ourselves to detect, triage and diagnose all problems and provide continuous improvements. We believe these changes will make your experience using Application Insights much more delightful but we would love to hear directly from you. Please provide feedback, suggestions or questions on User Voice and Forum.