Azure App Insights integration

Overview

The APEX AIOps Incident Management integration works in conjunction with Azure Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, to gather metrics and gain actionable insights for your live applications.

After supplying Incident Management with identifying information for the Azure resource you want to monitor, you can:

Use the Incident Management anomaly engines to automatically detect application anomalies.
Deduplicate events identified by the Incident Management algorithms into alerts.
Correlate alerts into incidents, reducing the number of Azure Application Insights events which operators need to investigate.

Note

Azure Application Insights is a paid service. Before you enable this integration, you should review Microsoft's pricing policies to avoid unexpected charges. For more information, go to the Microsoft documentation and search for "Azure Application Insights pricing."

How it works

Incident Management polls the Azure Application Insights API every minute to retrieve the metrics for the configured App Insights instance. The metrics are then pushed through the anomaly engine and converted to datums in Incident Management.

App Insights metric to Incident Management metric format (where "source" is mapped to the resource name in Application Insights and "metric" is mapped to the metric name in Application Insights):

{
  source: “azure-webapp-201023070138”,
  metric: “requests/count”,
  data: “10”,
}

Before you begin

This integration was validated with Azure on February 2, 2021.

Before you can monitor events using the Azure App Insights integration, you must have:

A resource configured to monitor an application in Azure Application Insights.
Refer to the Microsoft documentation if you need help with creating a resource in Azure Application Insights.

NOTE: The integration does not currently support Azure tags.

Configuration

In Azure Application Insights

In your Azure instance, navigate to Home > Application Insights to access your Application Insights implementation.
Select the resource you want to monitor.
Within the selected resource, search for API Access and then click the menu item.
Copy the Application ID for the resource and paste it into a location you can access in the next section.
Incident Management identifies the data in Azure using the resource Application ID.
Click Create API key and generate a new API key with the Read telemetry permission.
Copy the API key and paste it into a location you can access in the next section.

In Incident Management

In Incident Management, click Settings > Credential Store.
Click Add Credentials, and then click Azure App Insights in the list of credentials.
In the Name field, enter an identifying name for this credential set.
In the API Key field, paste the API Key you copied from Azure.
In the App ID field, paste the ID of the application you want to poll from Incident Management, and then click Save.
Click Integrations > Ingestion Services, and then click Azure App Insights in the list of integrations.
Click Add an App Insights Account.
In the Name field, enter a name to identify the integration.
Click the down arrow and select the credentials you created in step 5.
Click Test to make sure the settings are correct.
Click Save after your integration tests successfully.

The integration is now configured.

To view your resource metrics, click Incidents > Metrics in the Incident Management interface. Note that if your resource does not display any activity in Azure, then no metrics display in Incident Management.

In this section: