During the Microsoft BUILD conference and in Merav Davidson’s recent blog post, we announced that Visual Studio Application Insights was ready for Public Preview. As part of Application Insights’ Public Preview we are launching a new cloud-friendly pricing model that is based on data volume per application and designed to offer great value for all development teams. Pricing goes into effect June 1, 2015, and will be at a 50% discount while in Public Preview. 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 generates a higher data volume, or you simply want access to data over longer periods for richer analysis, you can take advantage of the Standard and Premium tiers which increase the monthly quota of data points included with each tier, retain data for longer periods and enable the Continuous Export feature. You pay for volume of data. If yours is a web app, it doesn’t matter how many servers it’s deployed on. We want to let you scale dynamically, without penalty for resources you haven’t used. In addition to the Free, Standard and Premium tiers, each Application Insights resource is enabled for a free 30 Day Premium Trial. This has all the features of the Premium tier but with no monthly cost, so that you can get the full Application Insights experience and decide which tier is appropriate for a particular application.
Managing your Application Insights Pricing
To select the pricing tier for your Application Insights resource, open the resource, click the Settings command and then select the “Quota + pricing” option.
This will open the “Quota + pricing configuration” blade.
Working around the blade clockwise, the first tile is “Data this month”. This shows the percentage of the current tier’s quota which has been used so far this calendar month. The count of accumulated telemetry resets on the first day of each calendar month. (Note that this is not necessarily the same as the billing cycle for this resource’s subscription.) This count includes all data collected by Application Insights except session telemetry (e.g. count of sessions, geography, environmental and device type data) which has no quota. The types of data points which will count towards your quota are:
- Requests: any request received by the managed application or sent via the TrackRequest API
- Exceptions: each collected unhandled exception/crash or sent via the TrackException API
- Dependencies: each call to a remote dependency from the managed application
- Page views: each page loaded from your website, in your mobile application or sent via the TrackPage API
- Performance counters: each instance of performance data collected (either the default counters or as user-specified counters)
- Custom events: each event sent via the TrackEvent API
- Custom metrics: each metric sent via the TrackMetric API
- Trace logs: each trace entry from the logging adaptors or the TrackTrace API
- Web test data: the data generated by web tests about the success/failure of the tests
Data submitted from your webtests will soon be counted against your quota as well. The next tile is where you can configure whether you want to enable collection of telemetry data above the quota which is included in your selected pricing tier. This option is not available in the Free tier. By default, Application Insights resources will not be enabled to collect this additional telemetry and this is explicitly an opt-in model. Below this is the “Pricing tier” tile. Clicking this will open the “Choose your pricing tier” blade. It is here that you can select which pricing tier you want to use. Application Insights resources created after June 1 will all be created in the Free tier, and you can then select to move into the Standard, Premium or 30 Day Premium Trial tier at any time. You can start the 30 Day Premium Trial whenever you like, but once it is started, the resource will stay in this tier for 30 days. At the end of the trial, the resource will revert to whatever pricing tier it was in before starting the trial. If you want to change to a different pricing tier at the end of the trial, you can use this blade to select that tier at any point during the trial duration.
Finally the bottommost tile on this blade, “Data point volume” shows the number of data points processed for this application in the past 30 days so that you can watch for trends and understand what types of data contribute the most to my data volume.
What happens on June 1
When we turn on the Application Insights pricing on June 1, 2015, we will move all active Application Insights resources into the 30 Day Premium Trial pricing tier. That means that for the next 30 days you will get the highest level of Application Insights’ features and data volume quota, and ensure that our users who are employing Continuous Export are unaffected during this transition. (As noted above, Application Insights resources created after this change will all start in the Free pricing tier and it is up to you when you want to use the 30 Day Premium Trial.) At the end of the 30 day trial, all resources will revert to the Free pricing tier by default. If you are using Continuous Export, be sure to select the Standard or Premium pricing tier before the end of the 30 day trial to ensure uninterrupted export functionality. Of course we’ll remind you by email as well.
Summary
The implementation of Application Insights’ cloud-friendly pricing model is starting on June 1, 2015. This model is based on data volume per application and designed to offer great value for free for all development teams. There is no immediate action needed from you, as all applications being monitored with Application Insights will be put into the 30 Day Premium Trial at this point which provides the same experience you are getting from Application Insights now. However, during the 30 day trial, you should consider which pricing tier is right for your application based on its telemetry volume and the features you need (length of data retention and Continuous Export) and select that as the tier we will use for your application after the end of the trial.
Update (June 27)
To give you more time to evaluate our Premium offering, we are extending the premium trial. For all resources that had the Premium Trial enabled before June 17, the trial will be automatically extended until July 17. There is no action required on your part – this will automatically be applied to all of your Application Insights resources. We recommend you to monitor your current data volumes to help you select the appropriate Application Insights Pricing Tier. Also, try out features like Continuous Export which is only available in the Standard and Premium tiers. Refer to the “Quota and pricing configuration” blade, assessable from the Settings option on each Applications Insight overview blade, for details about the pricing plans.
Update (September 4)
This week we enabled the inclusion of web test data into the data point volume that counts against a resource's quota.