Disable Application Insights dependency tracking for specific method

Question

Is it possible to disable Application Insights dependency tracking for a specific method/function?

My specific problem is that I've got a custom ITelemetryInitializer and within that, I'm calling a static function that can have an external dependency if the value isn't already cached in memory. Within that function, it's creating a new ITelemetry and calling my ITelemetryInitializer, which generates a new ITelemetry, etc., resulting in a StackOverflowException.

Basically (this is NOT my actual code):

public void Initialize(ITelemetry telemetry)
{
    var cached = GetCachedValue();
    if(cached)
        return cached;
    else
    {
        var value = GetData();  // New Telemetry gets created here - since it's not cached yet, the new telemetry gets initialized and goes right back here.
        SetCachedValue(value);
    }
}

I'm reworking my initializer to NOT use the external dependency, but I think the question is still valid - if there's a specific thing I don't want tracked, can I disable telemetry for that thing (in my example, I'd want to turn off tracking for the GetData method)?

ZakiMa ZakiMa · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-27T08:30:01

It is possible to disable dependency tracking using ITelemetryProcessor (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-insights/app-insights-api-filtering-sampling).

But this will not help in your case since ITelemetryInitializer will be called first anyway. The right solution is not to do dependency calls from ITelemetryInitializer.

Disable Application Insights dependency tracking for specific method

1 Answers