Application Insights
You can use Microsoft's Azure Application Insights with Optimizely Configured Commerce to monitor the performance, availability, and usage of your storefront and its various dependencies. Having visibility to the components of the overall solution gives better prioritization on upcoming initiatives and increased troubleshooting capability for you and your development team.
Benefits
Application Insights has the following benefits:
- Visibility into integration health – Real-time dashboards show whether each third-party API is up, slow, or failing.
- Rapid problem identification – Automatic alerts pinpoint underperforming services and when issues begin.
- Data-driven troubleshooting – Telemetry provides objective evidence to engage vendors or developers.
- Proactive issue resolution – Smart alerts and anomaly detection surface problems before users are impacted.
- Improved user experience and continuity – Healthy integrations keep carts moving, orders processing, and operations stable.
Prerequisites and access
Your tenant admin or partner development team typically support the Azure instance and have or can provided the proper access rights.
Configure the connection string
This setting is only available for ISC_System and ISC_Implementer user roles.
- Go to Administration > Settings in the Admin Console.
- Enter the Application Insights Connection String under System Settings > Developer.
- Complete a site restart to apply the changes.
Disable database tracking
This setting is only available for ISC_System and ISC_Implementer user roles.
Within Admin Console > System > Settings > Developer, you can toggle on Application Insights Disable Database Tracking to filter out SQL dependency telemetry before it leaves the application, reducing Azure data storage costs associated with high-volume database interaction logging.
Visualize the application map
The Configured Commerce integration with Application Insights uses automated instrumentation to gather telemetry data from all supported dependencies automatically. In most cases, you should see useful information with just the OOTB integration immediately upon site restart. However, certain dependencies may require custom code to be included. See the developer documentation for this and other customization opportunities.
Expect to see these services on the Application Map:
- Configured Commerce SQL database server
- CDN for product images (like Amazon S3)
- Search service (like ElasticSearch or Google Retail Search)
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Product Information Management (PIM)
- Performance monitoring
- Analytics
Filter data when multiple apps report to one instance
If you have an App Insights instance that is gathering data from more than one application, you may want the capability to filter the contributing application from within the Azure App Portal. This scenario is supported using custom attributes on the Microsoft Telemetry Event object. See Add Application Insights in .NET for information.
When to involve your development team
The Optimizely team designed the Application Insights integration to be extensible so that partner developers can further customize it to fit their clients’ needs. This includes the following scenarios:
- A desired dependency uses technology that is not supported by Application Insights' automatic instrumentation .
- There are performance concerns around a specific API endpoint or customization.
- You need to create a custom metric for monitoring the health of your specific site.
Your partner development team can customize Application Insights for your use case as needed. See Add Application Insights in .NET in the developer documentation