I’ve recently been doing battle trying to get Azure Application Insights playing nice with an Azure Function. Because they are from the same family I thought there wouldn’t be an issue but, Microsoft’s lack of documentation is really letting down the team here. This will be a short and sweet post that hopefully clears some things up.
Adding Application Insights
So the first thing that is different about using Application Insights with an Azure Function is that you don’t need any additional nuget packages. Under the hood, the packages that a function relies on out of the box themselves rely on the application insights package. So theoretically, everything is set up for you.
The only thing you actually need to do is set an application key of “APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY” somewhere in your application.
For a function hosted on Azure, this is easy, you can do this on the configuration tab of your function and add your instrumentation key there.
Locally, you will be using either local.settings.json or appsettings.json depending on how your function is set up. Generally, either will work but it mostly depends on your individual project how you are managing settings locally.
Again, you don’t need to do anything to read this key, you just need to have it there and automagically, the function will wire everything up.
Now the other thing to note is that in the Azure Portal, on a Function, you’ll have an option to “Enable Application Insights” if you haven’t already. It looks a bit like so :
But actually all this does is add the instrumentation key to your appsettings. Just like we do above. It doesn’t do any fancy behind the scenes wiring up. It’s literally just a text field that wires everything up for you.
Configuring Application Insights For Azure Functions
So the next thing I found was that you were supposedly able to edit your host.json file of your function, and add in settings for insights. But what I found is that there is a tonne of settings that aren’t documented (yet?). The official documentation is located here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-host-json. It looks good, but doesn’t seem to to have quite as many options for Application Insights as say, using it in a regular C# app.
So I actually had to dig into the source code. That took me here : https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk/blob/v3.0.26/src/Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Logging.ApplicationInsights/ApplicationInsightsLoggerOptions.cs. These are the actual settings that you can configure, some of which you cannot find documentation for but can make some educated guesses on what they do.
For me, I needed this :
"dependencyTrackingOptions": {
"enableSqlCommandTextInstrumentation" : true
}
This enables Application Insights to not only capture that a SQL command took place, but capture the actual text of the SQL so that I can debug any slow queries I see happening inside the application.
Again, I couldn’t find any documentation on setting this variable up, except the original source code. Yay open source!
If It Doesn’t Work, Chances Are There Is A Bug
The other thing I noticed about Application Insights in general is that there are a tonne of bugs that hang around for much longer than you might expect. For example, when I first added my app insights key to my function, I wasn’t collecting any information about SQL queries coming from the app. Asking around, people just assumed maybe you had to add another nuget package for that, or that I had set something up wrong.
Infact, there is a bug that has been 3 – 6 months that certain versions of EntityFramework suddenly don’t work with App Insights. Insights would capture the correct request, but it wouldn’t log any SQL dependency telemetry with any version of EFCore above 3.1.4.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63053334/enable-sql-dependency-in-application-insights-on-azure-functions-with-ef-core
https://github.com/microsoft/ApplicationInsights-dotnet/issues/2032
https://github.com/Azure/Azure-Functions/issues/1613
How does this help you? Well it probably doesn’t unless specifically you are missing SQL queries from your App Insights. But I just want to point out that by default, out of the box, adding Application Insights to an Azure Function should capture *everything*. You do not have to do anything extra. If you are not capturing something (For example, I saw another bug that it wasn’t capturing HttpClient requests correctly), then almost certainly it will be the mishmash of versions of something you are using causing the problem.
