Release Annotations from anywhere

Many of you are now familiar with Release Annotations and have begun adding them to your Application Insights resources. Up to this point the only way to see these Release Annotations is to add them to a Visual Studio Team Services Release. This integration is fantastic for VSTS users.

After announcing this functionality, we immediately received feedback from a lot of users that basically amounted to “Hey, these Annotations are great and we’d really like to use them, but we use something else for our app releases right now.” Well, we hear you loud and clear! So to support our user base that does not currently use VSTS, we’d like to bring you a Powershell script you can use to create Release Annotations from anywhere.

You can find the Powershell script on GitHub.

The general usage looks like this:

.CreateReleaseAnnotation.ps1 -applicationId "" -apiKey "" -releaseName "" -releaseProperties @{"ReleaseDescription"="Release with annotation";"TriggerBy"="John Doe"}

This means you simply need to generate an API key, then copy this and the appId from the Azure portal. Once you have these, you are ready to use the Powershell script, filling in the attributes as appropriate.

Update: Thanks to Rory Primrose, you can now create a Application Insights release annotation in an Octopus Deploy workflow. The template and its documentation can be found on GitHub here.

Going forward

As we expand the functionality of Annotations, bringing multiple kinds to users as well as allowing for custom annotations, we plan to modify this Powershell script to support those additional options. Obviously, you can copy and tweak this script yourself at any time to work with specific or custom kinds of Annotations as they become available as well.

We hope to grant more direct access through the API as it matures and are also looking at ways we can provide an even easier way of injecting annotations through the portal’s UI. You keep watching, and we’ll keep evolving.

As always, please share your ideas for new or improved features on the Application Insights User Voice page and ask questions in our Application Insights Forum.