How to use Application Insights in more than one application?

Question

It is possible to use the Application Insights in more than one application and in Azure I have to filter the data of each application separately ?

Answer 1

Application Insights can be used in more than one application?

YES! There is no restriction on that. It’s even common to use a single service for backend metrics - API - and clients - WEB, Mobile, etc. But, it’s not very easy to manage after that.

... and in Azure I have to filter the data of each application separately?

Exactly here is the problem, if everything is part of the same software - backend, mobile client - you can even consider. But being different system, besides not being easy to later separate, there is no reason to do this.

To filter, you can add a ITelemetryProcessor to intercept the trackings.

public class MeuFiltroTelemetryProcessor : ITelemetryProcessor
{
    private ITelemetryProcessor Next { get; set; }

    public MeuFiltroProcessor(ITelemetryProcessor next)
    {
        Next = next;
    }

    public void Process(ITelemetry item)
    {
        var request = item as RequestTelemetry;
        if (request == null)
        {
            Next.Process(item);
            return;
        }

        if (request.VeioDoBackend())
        {
            request.Context.Properties["Backend"] = "true";
        }
        else if (request.VeioDoWebsite())
        {
            request.Context.Properties["Website"] = "true";
        }
        else if (request.VeioDoMobileApp())
        {
            request.Context.Properties["MobileApp"] = "true";
        }

        Next.Process(item);
    }
}

Then just add your processor to the main service:

var builder = TelemetryConfiguration.Active.TelemetryProcessorChainBuilder;
builder.Use(next => new MeuFiltroTelemetryProcessor(next));
builder.Build();

Now, via Appinsights portal, just filter by Backend, WebSite or MobileApp.

There is no cost to have numerous Appinsights services. Current plans only start to charge you after a few Giga of bigdata stored, which can take a long time. If you share the service, you will reach that billing start line faster, when you have a service per app, it will be much harder to cross that limit.