Skip to main content

Azure Application Insights - Tracking Operations in a Console App

If you are using the Application Insights SDK inside your ASP.NET (Core) application, every incoming HTTP request will start an operation context and will allow you track this request including any dependencies called along the way. But if you are using a console application(as a batch job for example) , there isn't the concept of an incoming request so the SDK doesn't track a lot out-of-the-box.

Configure your Console app to use Application Insights

Let me show you how you can still track operations in a Console App.

  • Start by adding the Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.WorkerService nuget package to your console app:

dotnet add package Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.WorkerService

  • Now you can add the bootstrapping logic to configure App Insights for your console app:
  • The code above will build up the required services and allows you to resolve a TelemetryClient instance that we’ll use in the next part.
    • Remark: Notice the FlushAsync method at the end to make sure that all telemetry data is sent to Azure.

Track operations manually

To track operations manually we need to invoke the StartOperation() method on the TelemetryClient instance.

The StartOperation() method returns an IOperationHolder<> that will stop the operation once disposed. It is also possible to explicitly call the StopOperation() method.

Every call that we do inside the using block will be linked to the same operation:

If you look at how the data arrives in Application Insights, you see that is nicely correlated.

Here is the Transaction Search view:

And here is the same operation queried using KQL:

 

More information:

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.