I am very excited with all the announcements being made at Microsoft BUILD conference today! As you might have read in Soma’s blog and Brian Harry’s blog, we are announcing Public Preview of Visual Studio Application Insights, which is an analytics solution for any app that brings together Application Performance Management and Usage Analytics.
Application Insights provides development teams with a comprehensive 360° view across their live application’s performance, availability and usage. With intuitive views and powerful tools for fast troubleshooting and diagnostics, it helps you analyze user activity and adoption, so that you can prioritize future work accordingly.
As part of Application Insights’ Public Preview we are launching a new cloud-friendly pricing model that is based on telemetry volume per app and designed to offer great value for free for all development teams. Pricing goes into effect June 2015, and will be at 50% discount while in Public Preview.
Can I really use it for any app?
Yes. There’s a wide and growing range of platforms we support.
Our iOS and Android SDKs provide support for usage insights and crash diagnostics, thanks to the powerful capabilities we are integrating from HockeyApp. And of course we support Windows Phone, Store and UAP apps.
J2EE apps are supported with out-of-the-box telemetry on any development platform, and with integrated tools if you’re using Eclipse.
ASP.NET developers can opt-in to Application Insights with one click in Visual Studio. And if yours is an Azure Web App or running in an Azure VM, you’ll find Application Insights tightly coupled there too.
Using our JavaScript SDK, you can send telemetry from any web page.
Additionally there are Application Insights SDKs for a growing range of languages and platforms such as PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, WordPress, and SharePoint.
If you’d like to, you can write your own. For each app type, an Application Insights SDK sends telemetry to our service, to be analyzed and presented to you in the portal. So any app can be monitored, if there’s an SDK for its platform. And although Application Insights is a service hosted in Azure, you really can use it on any app, regardless of the platform or where it is hosted.
Who’s using it?
We already have close to 450,000 applications using Application Insights. Every day, more and more developers are adding Application Insights to their apps.
Here is what a few of our customers are saying:
“I have a vision of a complete DevOps story, and AI could help us get there. AI has already helped us solve problems we wouldn’t have even identified without it!”
– Joona Kokkola, Director, Technology, Maestro (Finland)“Application Insights is not just an operations tool for determining performance or user behavior. It’s truly part of the development process!”
– Ray Escamilla, QA and Release Manager, Dominion Enterprises (US)“Application Insights has become a cornerstone service for monitoring over $50 Billion of Microsoft’s revenue in our org and we are excited for its future!”
– Eric Mattingly, Service Engineer, Microsoft Enterprise Commerce
They are happy because Application Insights gives them:
- 360° Views across availability, performance and usage
- Fast and powerful troubleshooting, diagnostics and usage insights
- Built-in analytics for any app
- Great value for free with a cloud friendly pricing model
Let’s look at each of those in turn.
360° Views across Availability, Performance and Usage
According to Gartner, the need for a complete view across availability, performance and usage is ranked as one of the Top 10 mobile technologies and capabilities organizations must master in 2015-2016. With Application Insights you can achieve an integrated view from every angle across your entire application stack and even across multiple platforms in one place.
You can trace user paths through your scenarios with custom instrumentation and can take advantage of powerful drill down capabilities, slicing and dicing your data, filtering and segmenting it and searching specific instances, allowing you to answer questions such as:
- Do I have performance bottlenecks?
- Am I attracting new users faster or slower than last month?
- How were my users impacted by service performance issues?
- Which user segments were impacted the most?
Fast and Powerful Troubleshooting and Diagnostics
You can’t afford downtime in your application or service. As a developer or service engineer, you have to identify issues before they impact your business. The tools in Application Insights let you identify and diagnose issues as soon as they occur.
Real-time mobile crash analytics allows you to get crash details from the device, understand what happened leading up to the crash, and prioritize fixes based on customer impact. For your web applications, you can diagnose failed requests, exceptions & dependency failures, and even correlate with your trace logs & custom events for deeper context.
For web apps, you can set up alerts based on web tests or URL pings and define your own metrics-based thresholds so that you know about abnormal service behaviors before they impact customers.
Built-in Analytics for Any App
We have designed Application Insights to be an integral part of your development process and have made it easy to add to both new and existing applications, even if they are already live in production. It collects vital application data automatically with practically no effort, and is already part of your development workflow if you are using Visual Studio.
We take the same approach across many IDEs. Here’s the equivalent tool in Xcode:
As you’ve seen, the Application Insights portal provides a range of powerful analytic and search tools that you can apply to the stream of telemetry data from your apps. In addition, you can export data to external systems to let you mashup your telemetry with other data sources and perform further analysis.
Great value for Free with Cloud Friendly Pricing Model
Our new cloud friendly pricing model (from June 2015) is based on data volume per application. In the Free tier, you get most of the features with some limitations on volume of data and how long it is retained. As your application grows and you need more history, you can take advantage of the Standard and Premium tiers. You pay for volume of data. It doesn’t matter how many servers are deployed. We want to let you scale dynamically, without penalty for resources you haven’t used. And while we’re in Public Preview, there’s a 50% discount.
Summary
If you haven’t already, do try out Application Insights today! With built-in analytics, fast & powerful diagnostics and 360° view, you can stop flying blind, turn the lights on and be smarter about your apps.
One last thing. If you have been using Application Insights and would like to let us know your thoughts about the service, please share your feedback via this survey. For any questions and/or feedback, please visit the Application Insights Forum.