I found one more feature of Azure Application Insights I wanted to point out before changing subjects. If you are just joining it might be worth checking out the previous entries in this series.
Add Application Insights to an Existing ASP.NET Core Application
Azure Application Insights Overview
Analytics
On the overview of your Application Insights resource click on the Analytics button.
This will take you to a page that will let you query your Application Insight data. The following is the page you will see with one of the example queries and the results it provides.
The official docs for Analytics provide a lot of good resources and I recommend checking them out. We are going to do some exploration in this post, but this post won’t be enough to fully explorer all you can accomplish with Analytics.
If you want to explore Analytics and you don’t have a site up yet or your site doesn’t have much data, like my sample application, check out the Analytics Playground provided by Microsoft.
Schema
Analytics provides a very powerful way to query for information about your application. The first thing I recommend you doing is exploring the schema of the data available. The left side of the page provides the details of the schema that is available. As you can see in the screenshot below you can query details from traces, page views, request, performance counts just to call out a few. Each type has its own set of fields available.
Query Entry
The query entry area is in the top center of the page. You can read up on the details of the query language here. Thankfully the query editor provides IntelliSense as you can see in the screenshot below.
While the syntax isn’t anything like SQL the data is organized in a way that having SQL experience helped me think about how to explored and relate the data.
Results
Clicking the Run button will execute your query and you will the results in the bottom of the page. As you can see the results default to a time chart based on the render statement in the query above.
The chart type can be changed in the results area. There is also an option to view results in a table view (this is the default view if you don’t have a render statement in your query).
Wrapping Up
It is amazing how many features Application Insights provides. I glad I happened to notice Analytics. If you are using Application Insights take the time and really explore all the features that it provides. You never know when you will find a feature that could up being a critical insight into your application.
Also published on Medium.