Azure Application Insights - Debug API failures to database level using Application Map

Application Insights is a rich Application Performance Management (APM) feature provided in Microsoft Azure to monitor live applications. It allows you to evaluate real time analytics of your applications

Following are the key options provided.

 

Application Map

Application map allows you to check interactions among your application components and to drill down to any failures or performance concerns. In this post I'll summarize how to see API failures and drill down to a specific issue.

I have a live application which is hosted in Azure and I've configured it for Application Insights. Following is the component interaction map of my application.

Some arrows are colored in red, where those are the items we need to focus on.

I thought of drilling further into one specific interaction. You can do it by clicking on a information title embedded in an arrow (in this instance I clicked on the point with 702ms | 0.1%)

• Average response time is 702ms
• Failure percentage is 0.1%

This will open up a summary with failures, which I'm concerned about. I can see there are 2, 547 error instances. Lets dive deeper. In order to further debug, let's click on Investigate failures button.

In this view I can see when those erroneous transactions occur in a timeline and in the next tab I can see overall failures where I can further drilldown by clicking on the error instances. Here, I have to click on the number 2. It'll open up another blade where it shows the error description

Now click on the blue arrow to see further details

Now click on [show more] to see the detailed error message

By using the Application Map feature, we can drill down to the database level to debug issues