Visual Studio Application Insights is built for integration with other tools, and today we’d like to tell you about our plans to make that even easier. But first, as a case in point, we want to showcase one of our integration partners – Alooma. With Alooma’s SaaS service, you can easily transform raw telemetry events collected by Application Insights, directly into a data warehouse such as Amazon Redshift. Once there, the data is readily available for a host of analytical and BI tools to access.

In a nutshell, Alooma enables the following:

• Easily integrate data sources: Use any of dozens of built-in connectors, or use Alooma’s web and mobile APIs to build your own.
• Transform your data on the fly: In-stream transformations allow you to filter, clean, fix, and enrich your data, in real-time.
• Control how your data is stored: Automap your data to tables, or use data exploration tools to guide you to the optimal mapping.
• Intelligently handle changing schemas: Get notified when a new field appears in your data, or when an existing field appears in a different format. Events from the new schema will be kept for you until you decide how you would like them to load – no data gets lost.
• Transparent monitoring: Monitor the performance of your pipeline with built-in dashboards or build your own over Alooma’s metrics API.

Integrating Alooma with Application Insights is very easy – check out Export Application Insights to Amazon Redshift with Alooma for detailed instructions.

Integration with Application Insights

Alooma is one of the first partner integrations of Application Insights. We’re aware that, as an engineering team, you want to use a multitude of tools to support your development / DevOps cycle. Like us, you want to use best-in-class tools suited for specific tasks, while weaving these tools together to fit your specific custom workflows.

To address these needs, we have designed Application Insights to be an open, extensible platform enabling easy integration through industry-standard extensibility mechanisms like REST APIs, open-source SDKs and more. Some of these extensibility points are available today, and we are working to announce additional ones soon.

Extensibility Mechanisms

Application Insights is a data centric solution, and therefore our initial focus is to enable integrations at the data layer. These fall into two broad categories:

1. Sending data to Application Insights: Telemetry data from application components, environment and infrastructure or application lifecycle can be sent using Application Insights SDKs or through the REST API. This data is stored using Application Insights’ rich information model and made available for further analysis and visualization using Metric Explorer and Search Explorer in the Application Insights portal.
2. Using Application Insights data in other tools: Significant value can be unlocked from the telemetry data collected and stored by Application Insights. Today, we enable this through Continuous Export and through integration with Power BI, and now with the Alooma integration. Additional API-based data solutions in the works. You can follow this work and provide your feedback through this item on Application Insights User Voice (additional items include webhook callback and alerting systems integrations).

Our customers already use these mechanisms to enable custom integrations. We are also working with partners, to enable a more streamlined integration experiences. For the full list of SDKs and integrations, please see our Languages, Platforms and Integrations index.

Please share your ideas for new or improved features at the Application Insights User Voice and for any questions visit the Application Insights Forum.

For potential partnership opportunities, please reach out to us through aipartners@microsoft.com .