D365 TypeScript Web Resources - Part 6 - Application Insights

Before you get stuck into this make sure you've checked out any previous parts to the series. Each part in this series follows on from the previous, so you may need to grab the code from the previous part if you haven't been following.

Application Insights

What is Application Insights?

Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals. Use it to monitor your live applications. It will automatically detect performance anomalies, and includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It's designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability. It works for apps on a wide variety of platforms including .NET, Node.js, Java, and Python hosted on-premises, hybrid, or any public cloud. It integrates with your DevOps process, and has connection points to a variety of development tools. It can monitor and analyze telemetry from mobile apps by integrating with Visual Studio App Center.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview

Setup

First lets install the npm package(s):

npm install @microsoft/applicationinsights-web

Next we need to setup Application Insights in Azure. If you don't have an azure subscription you can signup for a free trial here.

Create an Application Insights Resource in Azure by following the steps here (you can stop at the bit where you copy the instrumentation key)

Now you have an app insights resource and the instrumentation key we are ready to go!

The Code

First we'll put together a little module that encapsulates a minimal setup of Application Insights API

import { ApplicationInsights } from "@microsoft/applicationinsights-web";

const init = () => {
  const appins = new ApplicationInsights({
    config: {
      instrumentationKey: "YOUR_KEY",
    },
  });
  appins.loadAppInsights();
  (window as any).d365ts_appinsights = appins;
  return appins;
};

export const appInsights = (window as any).d365ts_appinsights
  ? ((window as any).d365ts_appinsights as ApplicationInsights)
  : init();

Now, we can simply import our module

import { appInsights } from "./appinsights";

And start tracking page views

appInsights.trackPageView();

Or track exceptions

appInsights.trackException({
  exception: { message: "This is an error", name: "Onload Error" },
});

There are also other tracking functions trackMetric, trackEvent, trackTrace, etc.

Telemetry Initializer

One of the great things about the telemetry initializer is that it allow you to define some custom data/properties to include when tracking

appins.addTelemetryInitializer((item) => {
  const globalCtx = Xrm.Utility.getGlobalContext();
  item.data.Username = globalCtx.userSettings?.userName;
  item.data.UserId = globalCtx.userSettings?.userId;
  item.data.SecurityRoles = (globalCtx.userSettings?.roles as any)
    ?.getAll()
    ?.map((item) => item.name)
    ?.join("|");
  item.data.OrgUniqueName = globalCtx.organizationSettings?.uniqueName;
  item.data.Client = globalCtx.client?.getClient();
  item.data.ClientState = globalCtx.client?.getClientState();
});

To have this included in all tracking we can add it with the module...

const init = () => {
  const appins = new ApplicationInsights({
    config: {
      instrumentationKey: "d5656791-01e1-4d2e-9172-08fd79545a97",
    },
  });
  appins.loadAppInsights();
  appins.addTelemetryInitializer((item) => {
    const globalCtx = Xrm.Utility.getGlobalContext();
    item.data.Username = globalCtx.userSettings?.userName;
    item.data.UserId = globalCtx.userSettings?.userId;
    item.data.SecurityRoles = (globalCtx.userSettings?.roles as any)
      ?.getAll()
      ?.map((item) => item.name)
      ?.join("|");
    item.data.OrgUniqueName = globalCtx.organizationSettings?.uniqueName;
    item.data.Client = globalCtx.client?.getClient();
    item.data.ClientState = globalCtx.client?.getClientState();
  });
  (window as any).d365ts_appinsights = appins;
  return appins;
};

You may even want to add a second telemetry initializer for adding some data from the form context

export const addFormContextTelemetryInitializer = (
  formContext: Xrm.BasicPage
) => {
  appInsights.addTelemetryInitializer((item) => {
    item.data.EntityName = formContext.data?.entity?.getEntityName();
    item.data.EntityId = formContext.data?.entity?.getId();
    item.data.FormName = formContext.ui?.formSelector
      ?.getCurrentItem()
      ?.getLabel();
    item.data.FormType = formContext.ui?.getFormType();
  });
};

Now when the form loads we can add the form context initializer

addFormContextTelemetryInitializer((formContext as unknown) as Xrm.BasicPage);

What's it look like!?

Ok ok! Here is what all that lovely data will look like in Azure Application Insights...

First we have the results in the transaction search:

Then after selecting a result we can see the detail:

And there we have it!

That's all folks!

I hope that has been useful!

You can download a copy of the source code for this blog post here

Thanks for reading.
Ollie