How to monitor a C# App with Azure App Insight and TelemetryClient

As a developer, it’s important to monitor your applications and services to ensure that they are performing as expected and to detect issues as soon as possible.

Azure Application Insights is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that can help you with this by providing real-time performance and usage data, as well as logs and alerts.

In this article, we’ll look at how to use the TelemetryClient class in C# to send telemetry data to Azure Application Insights.

Getting Started

To get started, you’ll need an Azure account and a C# application to monitor. You’ll also need to create an Application Insights resource in the Azure portal, which will provide you with an instrumentation key that you’ll use to configure the TelemetryClient class.

Once you have your application and instrumentation key, you can start using the TelemetryClient class to send telemetry data to Azure Application Insights.

Sending Telemetry Data

The TelemetryClient class provides various methods that you can use to send telemetry data to Azure Application Insights.

Here are a few examples:

Tracking an Event

To track an event, use the TrackEvent method

telemetry.TrackEvent("MyCustomEvent");

This will send an event to Azure Application Insights with the name « MyCustomEvent ».

Tracking a Metric

To track a metric, use the TrackMetric method:

telemetry.TrackMetric("MyCustomMetric", 42);

This will send a metric to Azure Application Insights with the name « MyCustomMetric » and a value of 42.

Tracking an Exception

To track an exception, use the TrackException method:

try
{
    // some code that might throw an exception
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    telemetry.TrackException(ex);
}

This will send information about the exception to Azure Application Insights.

Configuring TelemetryClient

To configure the TelemetryClient class to send telemetry data to Azure Application Insights, you’ll need to set the instrumentation key. You can do this either in code or using the APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY environment variable.

To set the instrumentation key in code, use the following code:

TelemetryConfiguration configuration = TelemetryConfiguration.CreateDefault();
configuration.InstrumentationKey = "YOUR_INSTRUMENTATION_KEY";
TelemetryClient telemetry = new TelemetryClient(configuration);

This will create a new instance of the TelemetryClient class with the specified instrumentation key.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at how to use the TelemetryClient class in C# to send telemetry data to Azure Application Insights. By monitoring your application with Azure Application Insights, you can gain insights into its performance and usage, and detect issues before they become critical.