Microsoft has introduced a new instrumentation feature to allow makers to collect detailed telemetry for their Canvas apps. In case you would like to know how many people are using your Canvas app, where they are accessing it from, what screens are most visited, and the devices or browsers that are most popular, well now we can get all this insight using Azure Application Insights.
The benefit of using Azure Application Insight is obvious. Once your app is connected to Azure Applications Insights, you can begin to gather information to help you drive better business decisions and improve the quality of your Canvas apps.
1. Create an Application Insights resource
Azure Application Insights displays data about your application in a Microsoft Azure resource. Hence, creating a new resource is part of setting up Application Insights to monitor a new application. After you have created your new resource, you can get its instrumentation key and use that to connect your app to Application Insights. The instrumentation key links your telemetry to the azure resource.
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Create a new Application Insights resource (Click on “Create Resource” and under the Developer Tools category, select Application Insights)
2. Connect your app to Application Insights
Once your Application Insight resource setup is complete, now it’s time to link your Canvas App with Application Insight resource. It’s really simple to do so.
- Copy the “Instrumentation Key” from Application Insight resource.
- Open your Canvas app and select the App object.
- In the App object panel, update the Instrumentation key property to your Azure App Insights instrumentation key.
- After you update the instrumentation key, save and publish your app.
3. View events in Application Insights
Well, now it’s time to dig in the app insights that will be collected by the Application Insight resource. Navigate to the app insight resource and we can look into various tabs/categories for different information.
Users View
In “Users” view, you can see how many people have used the app (these are not unique users, but I’ll have more about that later), the number of sessions for the app and the number of events logged. Details about where the users are located and the browsers and operating systems they use are also displayed. Drilling into one of the user sessions, you can explore detailed information such as the session length, the screens visited and also low-level transaction details.
Events View
In the “Events” view, you get a summary of all the screens viewed across all app sessions. You can use this information to analyse and understand screen usage or feature adoption in your app and make data-driven based decisions on your next features. For example, you may want to stop future investments on specific screens due to low usage and prioritize other features in the app.
User Flows View
User Flows is another great visual which shows how users navigate around your app. You can use this view to analyze the most used navigation paths. It will help you to reevaluate and redesign your app to reduce clicks and optimize the paths to the most popular features for your end-users.
This is just an introduction to quickly set up the app insight and utilize the out-of-the-box features. We can further enhance this feature or better we get more information out of it by using custom logging and analysing the telemetry in Power BI. I will go through that in my next post. For now, just try this feature and play around to think about various use cases of this amazing feature.
Till next time, Cheers 😉
This is awesome! Much easier than I thought it would be. Great article.
I am really glad you enjoyed this post.