News
Better Alerts for Visual Studio's Application Insights
The tool was entirely rebuilt for better monitoring of applications.
Application Insights, which provides analytics to Windows 8 apps, has a new Alerts page, with enhanced information and more at-a-glance data.
Microsoft's Charles Sterling discussed the new Alerts page on the Application Lifecycle Management blog today. The page, which has been entirely rebuilt, includes "significant back-end service improvements as well," Sterling says.
The front end, though, is what developers will be most interested in. Included in the new UI is trend and current assessments of an application, including how long a problem's existed, where it's located and which process is at fault. The information is listed in descending order of importance, so the most critical issues are at the top.
Some other functions of the Alerts page include:
- A date range of up to two weeks
- Filtering by substring from the "from the name of the application, performance metric or availability test name," according to the blog
- A Details Pane, which opens on the right when an item is clicked on the left
- Editable alert rules
- Timeline zooming to drill down on events at certain times
- Deployment and configuration changes are part of the timeline
Application Insights is part of Visual Studio Online, and came as one of the key features when it was announced Nov. 13, 2013. At the time, S. Somasegar, Corporate VP of the Developer Division, said it gives development teams a "360-degree view of an application's health." An update last February made it available for the offline version of Visual Studio 2013, as an add-in called Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Online is the cloud version of Team Foundation Server, Microsoft's chief development collaboration tool.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.