APM and centralized logging with Application Insights (workshop)

By Szymon Warda

Elevator Pitch

Application performance monitoring is a must have if You have an application in production and want to sleep at night. Centralized logging saves hours digging through log files from different applications, and servers. Why use Application Insights for it? In two words: cheap and awesome.

Description

Why use an APM tool? Because seeing what is happening across multiple machines and services in real time is the only way to stop an approach outrage from happening.

Why use a centralized logging solution? Because there is a better way for spending and evening than digging through multiple log files, log databases on multiple servers to get a glimpse of what is failing.

Why not run it yourself? Do You really want to have to take care of another bunch of systems?

For the last 5 years, I and 45 other developers have been building and supporting a distributed system used in production by a big multi-national corporation. I know the pain of having to remote to multiple servers to check why is the system running slow. At the other end - running custom Kibana and Graphite solutions.

This course will cover:

  • the importance of APM and centralized logging
  • installing Application Insights and configuration
  • how different parts of Application Insights work
  • Azure portal capabilities
  • alerts
  • custom server and browser metrics
  • application map
  • collecting performance counters
  • log querying
  • pricing and cost control
  • diagnostics
  • bug reporting

It will be a full hands-on workshop focusing not only on the Application Insights but also how to approach monitoring and logging in distributed systems.