Intro & Feedback Overview
App Center
Application Insights
Feedback Loops & App Center Analytics
Baselines & Noise
Course Summary
The course is part of these learning paths
The application lifecycle doesn’t finish with app deployment. Feedback is an important element of refining an application, whether that’s exception detection and diagnoses or improving the user experience. In this course, we will look at a suite of services that capture a vast array of feedback data, ranging from exceptions to client and server telemetry. This data can be turned into easily digestible information that can be used to trigger alerts and feedback into the development lifecycle as work items.
This course begins by describing what feedback is, and the types of feedback for improving application performance and usability. It then moves on to how we can integrate feedback into the software development lifecycle and what tools we can use to simplify that task. Finally, we will look at optimizing feedback mechanisms to get meaningful data from feedback noise.
For any feedback and questions relating to this course, please contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Designing application and user feedback loops
- Setting up crash and event notifications for App Center
- Setting up work item integration from App Center
- Making sense of App Center’s analytic and diagnostic information
- Adding Application Insights Telemetry to an application
- Setting up Application Insights alerts
- Work item integration from Application Insights
- Designing feedback dashboards
- Viewing Application Insights Telemetry data
- Discussing types of user feedback and how they can be captured
- Ways to baseline and filter feedback data
Intended Audience
This course is intended for:
- People preparing for Microsoft’s AZ-400 exam
- App developers
- Project managers
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have some experience with Microsoft Azure and application development, as well as knowledge of software project management concepts.
Let’s now go back to the App Center and see how we can incorporate analytics into a mobile or desktop application. Adding analytics is pretty much the same procedure as for crashes. Install the analytics package and add the using statement. Then add the typeof analytics parameter to the AppCenter start statement. You need to put the Analytics TrackEvent statement everywhere in your code where you want to log events. That could be in user interface events, navigation or API calls.
The overview page gives you basic user session data over time. The number of users and the duration of their sessions. You also get a breakdown of devices and operating systems running your app, as well as countries and languages. The countries display relies on a devices SIM card, so this won’t work for desktop applications. You are able to filter the overview and events by version and time frame. While you can integrate App Center data with Application Insights, from my experience there appears little to be gained from it at this time.
The events page is where we can see all the TrackEvent calls we set up within the application. There is a raw count figure, number of users and per user count. Clicking on an event will display event detail which is basically those same metrics but presented graphically over time. Unlike Application Insights the usefulness of event tracking is very dependent on the placement of TrackEvent calls and what data you choose to send back. My feeling is that this service is a long way from maturity and we will see is capabilities grow over time.
Log flow is App Center’s version of Application Insights live metric stream. This displays calls to TrackEvent in real time, give or take latency delays. You could think of it as being akin to a live stream of debug statements.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.