Sitecore uses log4net, which makes it relatively easy to set up new destinations for logs, etc.. One request we’d had was to log messages in the Sitecore logs into Application Insights.
I approached this by writing a custom appender, which would take our messages and write them to App Insights as Trace messages. This is what I came up with:
Continue reading “Appending Sitecore Logs into Application Insights”Application Insights records requests for all content pages in Sitecore as being for “Sitecore/Index”. That’s because this is the controller route under which those pages are processed – but it’s not that helpful if you want to see things like the performance of individual pages. Well, there is an answer, as detailed by Per Osbeck – Application Insights: GETing a fix for Sitecore/Index | by Per Osbeck | Medium .
The short form of this is he used a TelemetryProcessor to update the item.Context.Operation.Name and request.Name to the absoluteUrl being processed.
Continue reading “Splitting “Sitecore/Index” requests into their actual pages”TL;DR – Due to strange functionality and a poorly chosen default, Sitecore’s log4net.Filter.LevelRangeFilter may unexpectly terminate the chain of log4net filters you’ve configured, without later filters even being considered. This can be fixed by setting the “AcceptsOnMatch” attribute to false.
Continue reading “Sitecore’s LevelRangeFilter may unexpectedly terminate your log4net filter chain”Previously I posted about using a Log4Net Appender to record Sitecore logs to Application Insights. That code will write Trace Messages to App Insights. I’m already filtering the messages to WARN or above using standard Log4Net <filter>s – but what if I need to filter more particular messages. Well, I wrote a telemetry processor to do this, just like Requests and Dependencies.
Sitecore’s installer for Azure app services installs a neat feature; a Log4Net appender that writes Sitecore log entries to Application Insights as TRACE messages. Nifty! However, for reasons I cannot comprehend, this is not included in the normal installer. That’s a terrible shame, as App Insights is still useful for Sitecore running on actual tin or in a VM.
Continue reading “Writing Sitecore Logs to Azure Application Insights in IAAS/On Prem”So, previously I’ve written about filtering out all the successful Dependency messages going to App Insights. What about unsuccessful ones, though?
My Sitecore instance seems have a failing dependency that is clogging up my logs. It’s the same as mentioned in this StackExchange question. It doesn’t seem to cause any issue, though… and it isn’t every environment either. Anyway, I’d like to block it. Telemetry processors to the rescue…
Continue reading “Filtering App Insights Server-side Dependency messages”So, again, I’m trying to tame Application Insights. My logs are filling up with various requests for different health-check URLs. These get requested, over and over, day after day, and all are recorded in App Insights as Requests. However, I don’t care about these requests if they’re successful. In fact, I only care about if they fail. Can I exclude them?
Yes, I can. I’ll build a telemetry processor to filter them out.
Continue reading “Filtering App Insights server-side Health Check requests”Application Insights can record the performance of your dependencies – so things like requests to SQL server, MongoDB, etc.. That’s great – but it can become VERY verbose. I find frequently that most of my allocation of data is spent tracking every damn SQL statement run – and there could be hundreds in a single page load.
You can just turn on Dependency tracking completely – but that seems a bit of nuclear option. What if there IS a problem? I want to know about it!
Well, you can create your own Telemetry filter instead:
public class SuccessfulDependencyFilter : ITelemetryProcessor
{
private readonly ITelemetryProcessor _nextProcessor;
public SuccessfulDependencyFilter(ITelemetryProcessor nextProcessor)
{
_nextProcessor = nextProcessor;
}
public void Process(ITelemetry telemetry)
{
DependencyTelemetry dependencyTelemetry = telemetry as DependencyTelemetry;
if (dependencyTelemetry != null)
{
if (dependencyTelemetry.Success == true )
{
return;
}
}
_nextProcessor.Process(telemetry);
}
}This ITelemetryProcessor will check if the telemetry is a successful Dependency, and if it is, end processing (i.e. don’t write anything to App Insights).
To use it, add it to the ApplicationInsights.config in the TelemetryProcessors section:
Obviously, this means that if you have problems like a slow dependency that is still eventually successful then you won’t have any telemetry to show you that – but it VASTLY reduces the data being captured.
So, I found that our client JavaScript was recording quite a lot of successful dependency messages for loading 3rd party scripts:
Therefore, I wrote a telemetry filter to block sending them. I could just use sampling – but I’d prefer to have none.
onInit: function (sdk) {
/* Once the application insights instance has loaded and initialized this method will be called
This filter will block successful remote dependency requests being logged. */
sdk.addTelemetryInitializer(function(envelope) {
if (envelope.baseType === 'RemoteDependencyData')
{
if (envelope.baseData.success)
{
return false;
}
}
});
},From my testing, if the user blocks loading of a remote dependency I don’t see any kind of message being returned – even a failure, which is good.
So, we are using App Insights, and when we moved the client side script for recording JavaScript errors to our integration test instance we started to get a lot of errors of the form:
Script error: The browser’s same-origin policy prevents us from getting the details of this exception. Consider using the ‘crossorigin’ attribute.
There were a lot of these errors:
… and investigating them showed that the problems came from 3rd party JavaScript. All of these are inserted by Google Tag Manager, and aren’t in the site, or local development.
Well, I’m not going to be able to fix JavaScript written by 2 third-parties, and that isn’t even loaded directly by my page – so instead I’m going to ignore that error…
Continue reading “Filtering App Insights Client Exceptions from 3rd party JavaScript”
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