Contents
Intro & Feedback Overview
App Center
Application Insights
Feedback Loops & App Center Analytics
Baselines & Noise
Course Summary
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.
To enable integration between Application Insights and Azure DevOps we must setup work items. Select work items from the Configure menu. Make sure Azure DevOps Services is selected as the tracking system and then enter you domain.visualstudio.com url. As an aside, if you have switched over to the new dev.azure.com domain, use that. You switch to the new domain by going into overview within Organization settings on your DevOps site and simply flick the use new url switch. Microsoft says not all requests will be redirected to the new domain, so some planning will be required before making this move. Back to work items and enter the project name. The area, which for default project setups will be the same as the project name. I’ve seen in forums that a few people have trouble with the authorization, and I believe this is due to the fact that they are not using an active directory identity. The problem arises as you can login to visual studio, Azure DevOps and the Azure portal with the same email, that is not necessarily an active directory identity. If you find yourself getting an OAuth authorization error after clicking the authorize button, ten to one that will be the problem.
Now that I’ve authorized with the correct identity, I can create a ticket in Azure DevOps from an Application Insights exception. If I go into failures under the investigate menu and drill into the operations a select one, I can create a work item from one of the instances. After opening the instance just click create work item at the top. Under new work item you can edit the fields if needed and assign the work item. Click ok and the item will appear in your work items board within your Azure DevOps project. Click on the item to enter values such effort required and any additional information or related work items.
When a work item ticket is created and assigned through your Azure DevOps project an email notification is sent. Within Visual Studio’s team explorer, you can select work items to view. Clicking on a work item will open it in a browser, although selecting Complete work item from the context menu will change the status to closed, directly from visual studio.
Work item flow is not a one-way street and work items, be they bugs, issues, features, tasks or user stories, can be created in Visual Studio team explorer and flow through to Azure DevOps for workflow management.
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.