What is the use case for Azure application insights or log analytics?
I am using APIM and Azure Functions and want to perform logging for requests. Which one is the best fit, application insights or log analytics?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/azure-monitor/overview
Update
In particular, any info on Azure application insights vs log analytics used for APIM?
What used to be known as Application Insights and Log Analytics independent offerings - are now a part of Azure Monitor. We're actively merging both platforms.
For instance, Analytics exploration part is exactly the same (same backend, same UX, same capabilities, just different data schema). Alerts are the same. Some experiences are still different (for instance, app experiences such as Application Map).
Example: in Azure Monitor Overview (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/azure-monitor/overview):
"Log Analytics" is referred as a feature and not what used to be known as Log Analytics as a product. For instance, Application Insights resources provide the same "Log Analytics" feature.
For Azure Functions / APIM the native integration with Azure Monitor is through Application Insights.
Update (October, 2020). Application Insights can now store data in Log Analytics workspaces. Now many workspace related features are available to Application Insights resources. How to migrate.
Azure Functions offers built-in integration with Azure Application Insights to monitor functions.
So for azure function, you'd better use application insights, which is easy configure.
Details are here.
Application Insights Application Insights is an Application Performance Management (APM) service, that you use to monitor your application. It helps to detect performance anomalies, has analytic abilities, and can help you understand how users interact with your application.
Not only can it collect telemetry data from your application, but it can also collect information from the application host, Azure Diagnostics, or Docker logs. It’s also nice that you can use Application Insights to set up tests that send requests to your website/service to check for availability (and receive a notice if these fail).
One of the most powerful things that I’ve noticed in my use of Application Insights (which is monitoring this blog), is the Smart Detection feature. This feature proactively analyzes and detects changes in your application. So even if you hadn’t set up an Alert of monitoring of a specific metric, it can pick it up and react to it.
