36 - Application Insights: The Tool You Never Knew You Needed
Production issues, performance bottlenecks, and silent failures are every developer’s nightmare. Azure Application Insights — part of the Azure Monitor family — gives you the visibility to detect, diagnose, and resolve problems before they escalate. In this session, Chris is joined by Isaac Levins (self-described Application Insights superfan) to explore how Application Insights fits into the full DevOps lifecycle.
Topics covered in this session include:
- What Application Insights is and how it sits within the broader Azure Monitor ecosystem
- Instrumenting a .NET 5 application via Visual Studio in seconds, using the eShopOnWeb reference app
- Codeless instrumentation for IIS-hosted apps using a PowerShell commandlet — no codebase access required
- Live exception tracking and root-cause analysis for production incidents
- User flow and funnel analysis to understand how customers navigate your application
- Business-level custom event tracking to inform product investment decisions
- How telemetry closes the DevOps loop — feeding insights back into the next development sprint
Whether you are a developer triaging exceptions, an architect evaluating observability tooling, or a product owner trying to understand real user behaviour, Application Insights delivers actionable data at every level.
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