Wow, this post is late. It’s been a pretty tough month for me personally. Probably the highlight was an ice storm that hit central North Carolina and crushed us. My house was without power for 4 days. The whole area looked like a war zone. There were trees down everywhere. Roads were impassable. It took me 2 days just to clear my driveway so we could get cars in and out. I took off an entire week plus to work on clean up. I’ve logged more hours with a chainsaw in the past month than, I think, most people do in a lifetime. Even now, I’m, at best, half way done clearing debris and repairing fence lines.
So, this post is ridiculously late and my blog has been pretty quiet. Sorry about that. I’ve got a ton of info to get out in the next week or so, so expect a fair number of postings.
A couple of weeks ago, we published the release notes for our sprint 62 deployment. The notable features in this deployment were in our Application Insights service and you can read about them in the release notes.
I want to take a few minutes to discuss one of them, in particular, though. In sprint 62, we introduced the first peek at a new log search service. This is a major addition to our application telemetry capabilities. We describe Application Insights as “Providing a 360 degree view of your application, helping you ensure that it is reliable, performing and delivering the business results you expect.” We’ve got Application Performance Monitoring (APM) capabilities, Usage analytics and now Log analytics. Log analytics allows you to mine all the telemetry (automatically generated or custom logging) to find patterns or to isolate problems. In a live service where you can’t just attach a debugger, logging is a lifeline that enables you to understand what’s actually happening inside the app and analyze the effects of changes that you make.
What you see there today is still just a humble beginning but we will continue to build on it and make it a VERY rich log analysis capability. Check it out when you have a change, give us your feedback and stay tuned for more enhancements.
Brian