AppCenter Extensions for ASP.NET Core and Application Insights

In my previous post, I wrote about an open source project called AppCenterExtensions available at Github and nuget.org. I recently updated this project and added a few components for ASP.NET Core that enables including AppCenter diagnostic information in Application Insights.

The NuGet package is called AppCenterExtensions.AppInsights and contains extension methods and ITelemetryInitializer implementations to be used in a ASP.NET Core web app for including AppCenter diagnostic information when logging to Application Insights

Enabling this is easy. Assuming that the project is already configured to use Application Insights, just add the AppCenterExtensions.AppInsights NuGet package mentioned above to your ASP.NET Core and call services.AddAppCenterTelemetry() in the ConfigureServices method of the Startup class

Here's an example:

public class Startup
{
    public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)
    {
        Configuration = configuration;
    }

    public IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        // Configure and register services to the IoC

        services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry();
        services.AddAppCenterTelemetry();
    }

    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)
    {
        // Configure app
    }
}

Once this is setup, AppCenter diagnostic information should now be searchable and visible in Application Insights.

Here's a screenshot of search results for the x-supportkey header



and here's a screenshot of the details of a single request containing AppCenter diagnostic information logged in Application Insights



With this flow you can now correlate Crash Reports and Analytics data from AppCenter with the HTTP requests for your backend systems in Application Insights. In the systems that I have been involved with building we include the AppCenter diagnostic information from our API Gateway to all calls to our internal Microservices