Making a map.

I like how WordPress’ default on these blog posts is “tell your story”. LOL.

Recently, I described wanting to use Azure App Insights for dependency tracking. I started by looking at documentation on it. I ended up using this, along with this video.

As I started looking into the first place to drop in dependency notification, which was where I create my Azure Container Instance. The tutorial’s code suggested dropping this fragment into a finally around where the dependency was, like so:

From: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/api-custom-events-metrics#trackdependency

Then I found myself wondering if for the dependencies I was going to track, wouldn’t a C# attribute be really good. Then I fell down a rabbit hole of when to create attributes.

And then I emerged out of that hole, attribute-less.

So, after I applied guidance from the Application Insights document, I colored my external operations with track dependency calls and ended up with this image:

Azure Application Insights application map for my solution

This does what I wanted, which is to visualize the components and dependencies of my solution, with information on success/failure and duration of the calls.

I’d like to do more with this.

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