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Azure App Insights

Microsoft Azure Application Insights | Tracetest Integration

Microsoft’s Azure App Insights is an extension of Azure Monitor which provides application performance monitoring(APM) capabilities.

What does Azure App Insights do?

Azure App Insights allows teams to monitor applications from development to production, helping to:

  • Proactively understand how an application is performing.
  • Reactively review application execution data to determine the cause of an incident.

How do Tracetest and Azure App Insights work together?

Tracetest leverages the traces captured by Azure App Insights to build end to end and interaction tests across your cloud native architecture. These tests created in Tracetest can verify against the response from calls against defined thresholds. In addition,  it can verify all the underlying processes that are exposed in the trace span data collected as a result of the triggering of the test. This interaction enables a distributed test to be created to verify the entire system flow across multiple microservices.

You have two choices when using Tracetest with Azure App Insights:

1) Send the trace information to Tracetest via the OpenTelemetry Collector. This is the method recommended by the OpenTelemetry community to collect, process, and export trace data from your system. The OpenTelemetry Collector is made to sit between your application and the trace data store, i.e. Azure App Insights. Tracetest leverages the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry Collector to collect the traces generated by a Tracetest test and route this data directly to the Tracetest server. The OpenTelemetry Collector also continues to send this trace information to Azure App Insights, allowing it to be analyzed there.

2) Configure Tracetest to pull the completed traces directly from Azure App Insights. This is the easiest way to get started. Currently, Azure App Insights takes quite a bit of time to make traces available via this direct connection (our testing showed around 2 minutes), so the OpenTelemetry Collector approach is recommended.

With both methods, your trace data is still available in Azure App Insights, which provides you in depth analytics across both your normal traces and the trace data created by trace-based tests. You can spot anomalies in Azure App Insights, diagnose them and create Tracetest tests to prevent regressions in the future. You can also use App Insights to view trends across your Tracetest test runs, allowing changes in performance over time to be identified.

Power your Trace-based Testing with Azure App Insights and Tracetest

Tracetest allows you to select Azure App Insights as your trace data store and provides details on how to either configure your OpenTelemetry Collector to create a second pipeline to route traces to Tracetest or to use the direct connection method.

How do I get started using Tracetest with Azure App Insights?

Azure App Insights website
Documentation