Set Up Monitoring and Practice Viewing Logs and Metrics

Application Insights is the application performance management (APM) component of Azure Monitor that provides real-time telemetry collection, log aggregation, and performance analytics for web applications running on Azure. In production environments, observability is the difference between diagnosing a customer-impacting outage in minutes versus spending hours guessing. It gives engineering teams visibility into request rates, failure patterns, dependency health, and end-to-end transaction traces without modifying application code. Application Insights works by connecting to a Log Analytics workspace where all telemetry is stored and queryable using the Kusto Query Language (KQL), a powerful read-only language designed for exploring large datasets of logs and metrics.

In this lab, you will enable Application Insights on a pre-provisioned Azure Web App, configure a health check endpoint, generate HTTP traffic to produce telemetry, and then practice navigating Live Metrics, the Failures and Performance blades, and the Logs interface. You will write KQL queries to filter requests, identify slow responses, count exceptions, and correlate traces, building the foundational observability skills that every cloud engineer needs for production support and incident response.

Objectives

Upon completing this intermediate level lab, you will be able to:

• Enable Application Insights monitoring on an existing Azure Web App using autoinstrumentation
• Configure a health check path to monitor application instance availability
• Generate HTTP traffic against the Web App to produce telemetry data
• Navigate Live Metrics, Performance, and Failures blades in Application Insights
• Write KQL queries to filter requests, analyze response times, and identify exceptions in the Logs interface
• Explore the Application Map and transaction diagnostics for end-to-end visibility

Who is this lab for?

This lab is designed for:

• Cloud engineers learning production monitoring and observability with Azure Application Insights
• Developers who need to instrument and debug web applications running on Azure
• DevOps engineers building observability practices for incident response and performance optimization