Configure performance monitoring in Microsoft Azure Cloud Services

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Application Insights is in preview.

Application Insights for Visual Studio Online can monitor your live web application’s performance and help you diagnose any performance issues or exceptions that occur. If there are any issues such as slow responses or uncaught exceptions, you can be notified by email. You’ll be able to open the stack trace in Visual Studio to pinpoint the problem in the code.

If your web service runs as a web role in Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, you add some scripts to your application solution in Visual Studio, and then redeploy your solution. You can monitor any web service, whether it’s an ordinary website or, for example, the server component of a phone app. The monitor collects data with very little overhead.

(There are other help topics about ASP.NET applications on an IIS server and Java web applications.

Download and install the Application Insights tools

Install the Microsoft Azure tools in your application development project.

  1. If you haven’t signed up to Visual Studio Online, do that now.

  2. Open Application Insights.

    Choose insights

  3. The next step depends on what you already have set up.

    • If you already set up usage monitoring for your app, go to PERFORMANCE and select your application name. Because you haven’t set up performance monitoring yet, you’ll see setup instructions. Click the link for other options in step 1.

      In Step 1, click to choose other options.

    • If this is the first time you have used this Application Insights account, choose the link for other options.

      Choose the 'other' option at the bottom.

    • If you want these performance metrics to appear under a different application name, choose Add Application.

      Choose Add Application at top right

  4. Select these options to get to the setup page for a Microsoft Azure project.

    Choose Yes, .NET. Yes, Cloud service

  5. Follow the instructions to set up your project for performance monitoring.

  6. Rebuild and deploy your application.

    Warning

    Do not select Enable Intellitrace or Enable profiling in the Publish wizard. Application Insights is incompatible with these settings.

View the performance results

After 20-30 minutes, look for the performance counters and metrics that will show up in the Server Performance and Diagnostics pages. 

Select the name of your application to see the results. 

Under Performance, Server, select your app.

Next step

Detect and diagnose performance issues

Troubleshooting

The setup failed

  • In your ServiceConfiguration.csdef file, make sure you don’t use osFamily="1" in <ServiceConfiguration>. You must use 2 or greater.

I don’t see any data

  1. Make sure you didn’t check Enable IntelliTrace or Enable profiling in Microsoft Azure publish settings. These options appear in the Advanced Options tab in the Publish wizard. Application Insights is incompatible with these options.