是否使用Application Insights记录查看的列表项？

Question

I need to create a record for every single content the users see on my system, so that later I can have some statistics/measures of what has been seen the most on the system.

In order to do that, I'm considering using Application Insights via javascript. But I got a few questions:

• Do Application Insights allow us to make a possible big number of calls often? (for every list-item that appears on the user screen as the screen is scrolled, I would make a call - and I could have many many users doing that at the same time)

• If some error happens when trying to make a call to Application Insights at a certain moment, will it try to make the call again later? (in other words, is it safe to trust that after I make my call they'll take care of it and they'll try to do it again later in case we're having an internet problem at the moment, for example?)

• Is it rather a bad approach to use Application Insights for this purpose? (I'm considering Application Insights also because it would reduce the number of calls to our database, and I don't need this data to be kept for a long time so the 3-months that we have with Application Insights would be enough)

What I mean by "calling Application Insights" is a simple ajax that would asynchronously request Application Insights to create a record that a list-item was viewed (I'd send each list-item ID along as they're viewed so we can identify and count the views each item had by the end of the day).

Anyone knows enough to help with these questions, maybe? =)

Answer 1

There are two ways to upload data to Application Insights from JavaScript:

1. Using JS AI SDK and call trackEvent
2. Calling AI ingestion point directly (Ajax)

Answering your questions for both approaches.

JS AI SDK

1. It is okay to call trackEvent as often as possible. JS AI SDK will batch documents and will minimize the number of AJAX calls to AI ingestion endpoint
2. Successful trackEvent doesn't mean that data got uploaded. There might be a few reasons why data will not be delivered: a) User closes browser right away; b) If there is no connection to AI ingestion endpoint.

Direct AJAX

1. It is okay to call AI ingestion endpoint as many times as needed
2. 200 response code means that data got persisted and there is a guarantee that data will not be lost

Re: Is it rather a bad approach to use Application Insights for this purpose?

(disclosure: I'm associated with Application Insights team)

If these events are business telemetry or logs important for audit then it fits into main scenarios of Application Insights.

If these events are more kind of debug/verbose level traces then though Application Insights still can be used here, you might want to double check that pricing is reasonable for the value.