Azure Application Insights - Monitoring availability averages for each request

Question

At work, we maintain an API that is called from a website and mobile applications. The website and these applications are maintained by an external team, and we don't have access to the source code. Our team is told frequently that the section that consumes our API is slow. Our API logs tells us otherwise, so we want to find where exactly these slowdowns occur.

I have set up an availability test for the website through Application Insights on Azure, as a multi-step test. The test will authenticate and call a few URLs on the website that consume our API. To help our analysis, I would need average time by URL called. I can get the average test time, or the end-to-end transaction detail. However, I cannot seem to find any averages by URL of the multi-step test.

Is there anything that can get me average response time by URL of the multi-step web test ? As an alternative, is there any way query or export the transaction details ?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Unfortunately, as of today, it is not possible neither to export transaction data nor to get average/95th data for transactions.

The best approximation (min overhead) you can get is to call only one API (so, it still will make more than one call - auth + API). This approach will not work if your auth call takes much more time than API/non-reliable.

Another approach is to track request duration from Service perspective (through AI SDK) and then in Availability Details UX you can go through anecdotal cases and check whether service telemetry maps to what you see from Web Test. This might help to give data point whether to trust service perspective or not.

PS: We'll consider adding UX option to submit data per transaction as well.