Azure Insights: .NET Core API

Monitor your ASP .NET Web API with Azure Application Insights

Create your .NET Core Web API

Include Application insights in the .NET Core API.

Deploy the code to Azure API service

View Insights and metrics on Azure dashboard

For our article purposes I am using my personal API with the following route’s and methods, we will be able to see these routes GET requests on Insights dashboard.

Create new or use existing .NET Core API

Add Application Insights NuGet packages to your project:

Go to Azure portal and use the Application Insights that comes with your API service plan and get the Instrumentation key:

App-service plan comes with Application insights

Copy the instrumentation key to appsettings.json file

Add the instrumentation key into ApplicationInsights section in appsettings.json

appsettings.json

{
  "ApplicationInsights": {
 "InstrumentationKey": "putinstrumentationkeyhere"
  },
  "Logging": {
 "LogLevel": {
   "Default": "Warning"
 }
  }
}

Add configuring Application insights telemetry in Startup.cs file

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
  ...
  services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry();       
  services.AddControllers();
}

Run your application locally and test your API (using Postman or any Rest Client). These queries can be seen on the insights dashboard.

Logs on the dashboard.

Application Insights are provided along with your App Service plan, even for free tier. Make use of some default log queries provided to filter and also see exceptions and failures. This helps debug your API as well.

In conclusion:

The Application Insights can monitor your applications no matter where or how they run. If your application is running and has network connectivity to Azure, telemetry can be collected. Application Insights monitoring is supported everywhere .NET Core is supported.