By Lisa van Baast, Power Platform Consultant, Dynamics4Business, Jan. 21, 2025
Applications Insights is a comprehensive monitoring service for developers and IT professionals offered by Microsoft as part of Azure Monitor. The benefits of Applications Insights are that it helps monitor performance and usage of Web applications, both during development and in production. This is useful for collecting telemetry data and gaining a better understanding of your applications' behavior.
A wide range of applications
Application Insights can be used for a wide range of applications, including:
ERP systems
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, which includes Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Business Central, can use Application Insights to provide in-depth insights into system performance. This allows for proactive troubleshooting and continuous optimization.
CRM software
Salesforce integrations, Dynamics Customer Service and our SmartCRM application can be monitored via Application Insights to monitor the performance of integrations and API calls, as well as identify any data transfer issues.
Power Platform
The various components of the Power Platform can also be analyzed with Application Insights.
For example Power Apps are connected to Application Insights to monitor user interactions, app performance and errors. The same is true for Power Automate. By logging flows into Application Insights, errors can be detected and companies can be alerted to them.
Cost
To use Azure Application Insights, you need an active Azure subscription. The specific cost for Application Insights is calculated based on the volume of telemetry data sent and how long you want to keep the data. By default, this data is kept for 90 days, but it is possible to extend this. For a current overview of the cost per gigabyte, please view Microsoft's price list.
What are the benefits of Application Insights for our customers?
Application Insights can offer many benefits to organizations that are just getting started with, or are already familiar with, data-driven decision-making. It helps ensure and improve the quality and reliability of your web applications, while enabling proactive action. What can Application Insights do for you:
Dashboards
It is possible to get real-time insight into the performance and usage of your applications, such as server response times, error rates and user activity, with a dashboard that you create yourself.
Performance Monitoring
By collecting detailed performance data, such as page load times and database dependencies, bottlenecks and delays can be quickly identified and fixed.
Error monitoring
Application Insights can automatically detect errors and exceptions in your applications. You can set up alerts for this so that you are notified immediately.
Usage tracking
A detailed collection of data about how users use your applications can improve the user experience. Among other things, information about which features are used most often, who logs in and where they encounter any problems is accurately recorded.
Example of using Application Insights
One of the many examples of using Application Insights is monitoring Dynamics 365 Business Central with various Web service requests. Web service requests (or Web service requests) are requests that form the basis of communication between different systems over the Internet or a network. If many requests are sent at once or a request takes a long time, this can have a detrimental effect on the performance of Business Central or the system to which requests are sent. By monitoring this in Application Insights, these problems can be quickly detected and optimized.
What can we do for you?
Application Insights is one of the managed services we offer to companies. We are happy to sit down with you to discuss which possible (web)applications Application Insights can add value and what the benefits are for you. By using Application Insights for your applications, problems can be quickly and proactively addressed and continuously optimized.
Contact us for more information or a no-obligation appointment.