Adding Custom Properties for Each Request in Application Insights Metrics

Adding custom properties for each request in Application Insights metrics (VB.NET)

I managed to get it to work as follow:

Imports Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Channel
Imports Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.DataContracts
Imports Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility

Public Class CustomTelemetry
    Implements ITelemetryInitializer

    Private Sub ITelemetryInitializer_Initialize(telemetry As ITelemetry) Implements ITelemetryInitializer.Initialize
        Dim requestTelemetry = CType(telemetry, RequestTelemetry)
        If (requestTelemetry Is Nothing) Then
            Return
        End If

        requestTelemetry.Properties.Add("TEST", "TESTERRRRRR")
    End Sub
End Class

Add Custom Properties to Application Insights Request Telemetry in WCF

I had to face similar issue as the author described. Tried by implementing ITelemetryInitializer/ITelemetryProcessor but did not work.

Ended up writing my own MessageTraceTelemetryModule class implementing IWcfTelemetryModule and IWcfMessageTrace.

In the OnTraceResponse method, I added my custom property to the request telemetry by extracting value from OperationContext (which is accessible here!):

internal class MessageTraceTelemetryModule : IWcfTelemetryModule, IWcfMessageTrace
{
    public void OnTraceResponse(IOperationContext operation, ref Message response)
    {
        if (OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageProperties.TryGetValue("clientID", out object value))
        {
            operation.Request.Properties.Add("clientID", value.ToString());
        }
    }
}

New custom property visible in Application Insights telemetry - ClientID custom property Pic.

Note that the clientID property is being set in the OperationContext in Message Inspector:

public object AfterReceiveRequest(ref Message request, IClientChannel channel, InstanceContext instanceContext)
{
    if(!OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageProperties.ContainsKey("clientID"))
        OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageProperties.Add("clientID", clientID);
}

Brief Context:
I implemented AAD Token based Authentication in a SOAP based WCF Service.

I needed to store the clientID from the token (which is validated in message inspector) and add the same as a custom property in the application insights request telemetry.

References:

1. Message Inspectors Documentation
2. Application Insights for WCF Documentation
   
   

Application Insights - How to add custom metric to your request information?

Using TelemetryInitializers is the right solution. Some comments:

• var requestTelemetry = telemetry as RequestTelemetry;: you do not use requestTelemetry after that. I guess you wanted to check for null.
• Adding telemetry initializer in the Active configuration should be fine. You can also consider moving it to the applicationinsights.config
• Custom properties do not show up in the portal immediately. Have you tried to reopen IE after some time and check your request again?
• Can you debug? Do you see that you get in your tememetry initializer? Do you see any AI specific traces in search?

Regarding your second question. Right now telemetry initializers are the only (official) way to get to the autogenerated RequestTelemetry (which is actually in the HttpContext). There are plans to make most of the classes in web public and eventually open source it. But there is no ETA yet. If you create and track request yourself you can add custom properties as you mentioned.

UPDATE: Starting from 2.0.0-beta3 autogenerated request telemetry is accessible though HttpContext extension method: System.Web.HttpContextExtension.GetRequestTelemetry

How to relate custom event properties with the metrics (out of box) provided by Azure App Insights

If you want to slice PageViews by username (set as custom property), you need to set UserName to PageView (instead or in addition to custom event). Just set UserName.

Just replace the simple call to trackPageView in JavaScript snippet to something like:
appInsights.trackPageView(title, url, {UserName: USERNAME})

Azure App Insights - Add Custom Property to Dependency Calls

TelemetryInitializers is the correct way of adding any additional custom property to any telemetry type - Traces/Dependencies/Requests etc.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/api-filtering-sampling#add-properties-itelemetryinitializer

Also if you are using default config, Dependencies/Traces made within the context of a Request will be automatically correlated together for you with same 'operation_id'.

---

Related Topics