Azure Application Insights–Set cloud role name in ASP.NET Core

One way to improve our Application Insights telemetry, is by setting the cloud role name yourself. I shared how to do this in an ASP.NET application in a previous post. In this post I'll show you how to use this approach in an ASP.NET Core application.

The first steps are quite similar.  We still need to create a custom TelemetryInitializer. Therefore we create a class that implements the ITelemetryInitializer interface and implement the Initialize method:

	public class CloudRoleNameTelemetryInitializer : ITelemetryInitializer
	{
	public void Initialize(ITelemetry telemetry)
	{
	// set custom role name here
	telemetry.Context.Cloud.RoleName = "FrontEndApp";
	}
	}

view raw CloudRoleNameTelemetryInitializer.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Now, in the Startup.ConfigureServices method, we register that telemetry initializer as a singleton:

services.AddSingleton<ITelemetryInitializer, CloudRoleNameTelemetryInitializer>();

view raw Startup.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Or if you are using .NET 6 minimal API’s:

	var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
	builder.Services.AddSingleton<ITelemetryInitializer, CloudRoleNameTelemetryInitializer>();

view raw Program.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub