In the last year, Application Insights has been making a transition from being part of the Visual Studio Online Portal to be one of the services offered in the new Azure Preview portal. It has been our vision to provide you complete 360° views of your applications' availability, performance and usage which can enable fast & powerful insights, help you solve problems and delight your users. Now, you can monitor your Windows Store & Windows Phone applications and both the client & server side of your ASP.NET web applications, right from within the Azure Preview portal, using Application Insights.
Today we are announcing an update to our policy for Application Insights on the Visual Studio Online portal. If you are already using Application Insights on the Visual Studio Online portal, you can continue to do so without any effect. However starting in mid-February, for users new to Application Insights, there will no longer be the option of using Application Insights in the Visual Studio Online portal. Instead, these customers should be using the Azure Preview portal. If you already have an account with Application Insights in Visual Studio Online, it will continue to work and you can add new applications. The only visible difference will be a banner encouraging users to try Application Insights in the Azure Preview portal.
We will switch off Applications Insights in the Visual Studio Online portal in mid-2015. By then, all customers should have moved to Application Insights in the Azure Preview Portal.
If you are still using Application Insights in the Visual Studio Online portal, I would recommend you to try out the new version in Azure Preview portal. That is where we're focusing all of our effort with new features and improvements every week.
What difference will you notice between the two versions?
In order to use Application Insights on the Azure Preview portal, you will need a subscription to Microsoft Azure. You might have a corporate subscription or you can get a pay-as-you-go account. Some interesting things you will notice:
- The new portal radically simplifies building, deploying, and managing your applications. It intuitively enables you to focus, drill down and get all the context needed for the problem at hand.
- You get fast & powerful interactive exploration of your data.
- You can export data from the portal so that you can do your own processing and correlations with other data sources.
- You no longer need to install an agent on each server to monitor performance of web applications, with the SDK having been enhanced to capture the metrics automatically. You can still, however, get more comprehensive telemetry by installing the new Status Monitor.
Learn about the new version
You can use the following resources to learn more about Application Insights on Azure Preview portal and try it out with some sample projects before deciding to transition your production applications:
- Application Insights Service Overview (Azure Preview portal)
- Application Insights Documentation (Azure Preview portal)
A brief overview of Application Insights for web apps is presented in this video:
How do I transition my applications to use the new version?
The process of transitioning you application is documentedhere in detail. Do note that there is no migration of data between portals. You can still use the Visual Studio Online portal to see historical data but all new data will come on the new Azure Preview portal.
Conclusion
Do try out Application Insights on the new Azure Preview portal if you haven't already (or haven’t recently) and for any questions and/or feedback, please visit the Application Insights Forum and for feature requests check out our User Voice!