Azure Application Insights for Service Fabric

Question

I have multiple services running on Service Fabric. I would like to add Application Insight for logging. I'm just wondering whether I have to add an Application Insight resource for each microservice or only one is common for all. What is the best practice?

Answer 1

There is no such thing a the best practice for this. It really depends. Some considerations:

• Pricing: depending on the level (basic or enterprise) you will get an amount of data for free / included in the base price. See the docs . So in some cases, depending on the amount of traffic you can reduce costs by having a dedicated AI resource per service. AI resources for services that send data below the threshold of the AI pricing plan are then (almost) free.
• Querying: if you split up services per AI resource getting an overview of the whole system is difficult since at the moment you cannot create queries spanning multiple AI resources.
• Responsibility: If you have multiple teams working on multiple services it might be an option to have an AI resource per team so they have a good insight in only the parts they are responsible for.

If you do decide to use a shared AI resource there are options like custom telemetry initializers to include custom data that further identify which ASF application or service is sending the data if it is not included by default.

See also Add Application Insight to a existing Azure Service Fabric cluster for more info about how to integrate AI.

Now, when it comes to bring data together you do have some additional options that may or may not need additional services or configuration. For example:

• PowerBi: You can visualize data of AI resources using dashboards, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-insights/app-insights-export-power-bi
• OMS: Operation Management Suite, See https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msoms/2016/09/26/application-insights-connector-in-oms/ . As Jesse mentions you can link multiple AI Resources
• Custom dashboards: Using the rest api you can create your own solution that displays data for one or more AI resources.