Random Thoughts

Introduction I recently set out to integrate Application Insights (AI) into my ASP.NET MVC 5 (not core, yet) web application hosted in Microsoft Azure.  I was sorely disappointed by the lack of in-depth documentation provided by Microsoft.  Whats more, most of the articles I found on the topic were outdated by several years.  I was able to piece together enough content online to get up-and-running, but had to dig into the source code to fully understand how to configure AI the way that I wanted it.  I'm going post a few little snippets here that I discovered along the way in the hopes that they help anyone else struggling to configure AI. Tracking Authenticated User ID in Application Insights

After getting the basic out-of-the-box inplementation of Application Insights (AI) up and running, I decided to customize it to pass the ID of the current user along with the telemetry.  The first couple of articles I discovered recommended writing a custom Telemetry Initializer to populate the Telemetry.Context.AuthenticatedUserId property.  Since my website uses ASP.NET forms authentication, I was able to grab the ID of the current user from the HttpContext.Current.User property.  My initializer ended up looking something like this: public class MyTelemetryInitializer : ITelemetryInitializer { public void Initialize(ITelemetry telemetry) { var identity = HttpContext.Current?.User?.Identity; if (identity == null) return; telemetry.Context.User.AuthenticatedUserId = identity.Name; } } Then I register my initializer using the following line of code in the app_start function of my Global.asax.cs file. ...