appinsights-instrumentation_skill

Overview

This skill instruments a webapp to send useful telemetry to Azure Application Insights, improving observability and troubleshooting. It guides detection of app type and hosting, recommends automatic instrumentation when available, and provides steps for manual resource creation and code changes for ASP.NET Core and Node.js apps.

How this skill works

The skill inspects the workspace to identify the programming language, framework, and hosting environment and then recommends the right instrumentation path. It prefers auto-instrumentation for supported scenarios (for example, ASP.NET Core on Azure App Service) and otherwise walks through creating an App Insights resource and injecting the SDK or configuration into the app. It always asks the user to confirm hosting details before proceeding.

When to use it

• You want end-to-end telemetry for a webapp running in Azure or elsewhere.
• You need to add performance, exception, or request tracking to an existing app.
• You want to centralize logs, metrics, and traces for debugging and alerts.
• You are preparing an app for production and need visibility into health and user behavior.
• You need to instrument a Node.js or ASP.NET Core application for Azure monitoring.

Best practices

• Detect language, framework, and hosting from source files and confirm any uncertain details with the user.
• Prefer platform auto-instrumentation when supported to minimize code changes and preserve app behavior.
• Create the Application Insights resource in the same meaningful resource group as the app to simplify management.
• Use infrastructure-as-code (Bicep/ARM) or Azure CLI scripts to create consistent, repeatable monitoring resources.
• Add only the telemetry you need initially, then expand to custom events and metrics to avoid noise and cost increases.

Example use cases

• Add Application Insights to an ASP.NET Core webapp deployed to Azure App Service using auto-instrumentation.
• Manually instrument a Node.js Express app to report requests, exceptions, and custom events to App Insights.
• Create an App Insights resource alongside existing infrastructure via Bicep or Azure CLI and wire the connection string into the app configuration.
• Instrument a containerized webapp by adding the SDK and environment configuration to the container image or runtime.