Creating alerts for specific exceptions with Application Insight (Microsoft Azure)

Question

I'm relatively new to Azure and am trying to see if there's a way to create notifications to occur in real time (or close to) whenever only certain exceptions occur using Application Insights.

Right now I'm able to track exceptions and to trigger metric alerts for when a threshold of exceptions occur over a certain amount of time but can't seem to figure out how to make these alerts sensitive to only certain kinds of exceptions. My first thoughts were to add properties to an exception as I used a telemetry client to track it with the 'TrackException' method then create an alert specific to that property but I'm still unable to figure out how to do it.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

There are two options:

1. Call TrackMetric (provide some metric name) when exception of particular type happens in addition to TrackException. Then configure alert based on this metric.

2. Write a tool/service/azure function which every few minutes runs a query in Application Insights Analytics and posts result as metric (using TrackMetric). Then configure alert from portal.

Right now AI team is working on providing #2 out of the box.

Answer 2

A couple years later now, there's a way to mostly do this with built in functionality.

There isn't an easy way to do this on every exception as it occurs, though. some apps have literally billions of exceptions per day, so evaluating your function every time a exception occurs would be pretty expensive.

Things like this are generally done with custom alerts that do a query and see if anything that meets the criteria exists in the new time period.

you'd do this with "log alerts", documented here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/alerts-unified-log

instead of getting an email every time a specific exception occurred, your query would run every N minutes, and if any rows meet the criteria, you'd get a single mail (or whatever you have the alert configured to do), and you keep getting mails every N minutes where rows that meet the criteria are found.