How to properly connect Azure Application Insights to the App Service Spring Application with Azure CLI scripts?

Question

I have my Spring Boot application hosted via Azure App Service with Azure CLI scripts. Also I deployed Azure Application Insights on the same subscription with Azure CLI scripts. My next step is to connect App Insights with App Service using only az commands and supplementary files.

I have gone through this documentation on how to connect App Insights codeless way. But it appeared I was still lacking a lot of metrics like requests, dependencies, exceptions and etc (although I have micrometrics in the classpath). Application Insights | Search only had traces, so I tried to connect it from Azure Portal and it worked. This integration restarted my application and did some magic I don't know about:

Here is an image of before I connected App Insights from Azure Portal and after:

Looking into the configuration of the App Service I saw several new values which were NOT described in the documentation:

{
  "XDT_MicrosoftApplicationInsights_PreemptSdk": "disabled",
  "XDT_MicrosoftApplicationInsights_Mode": "recommended",
  "XDT_MicrosoftApplicationInsights_BaseExtensions": "disabled",
  "SnapshotDebugger_EXTENSION_VERSION": "disabled",
  "InstrumentationEngine_EXTENSION_VERSION": "disabled",
  "DiagnosticServices_EXTENSION_VERSION": "~3",
  "APPINSIGHTS_PROFILERFEATURE_VERSION": "1.0.0",
  "APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY": "key",
  "APPINSIGHTS_SNAPSHOTFEATURE_VERSION": "1.0.0",
  "ApplicationInsightsAgent_EXTENSION_VERSION": "~2"
}

So my question is "How do I mimic this button with my Azure CLI scripts so it will have absolutely the same impact on my logs and metrics?"

You can just add these values to the configuration of app service by cli. — Ivan Yang
Yeah, I tried, but it not enough. Something else is going in during the deployment. — Praytic
When you execute this command to deploy application insights? after the site is ready? — Ivan Yang
Yes. Actually I found that it also injects -javaagent:/usr/local/app_insights/applicationinsights-agent-codeless-2.5.0.jar string into JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS env variable. Will try to override it with my agent. — Praytic
How do I pass environment variables directly to my container? — Praytic

Praytic Praytic · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-16T13:21:30

Before deploying your jar file to the App Services make sure you have latest dependencies with AI SDK in the classpath. Providing my set of the dependencies imported by Gradle:

//    Application Insights
    implementation "com.microsoft.azure:applicationinsights-spring-boot-starter:$appInsightsVersion"
    implementation "com.microsoft.azure:applicationinsights-logging-logback:$appInsightsVersion"
    implementation 'com.microsoft.azure:azure-spring-boot-metrics-starter'

Now after you compiled your application it's time to connect Application Insights to App Service using this Azure CLI script:

az webapp config appsettings set \
  -n ${APP_NAME} \
  -g ${GROUP_NAME} \
  --settings \
APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY=${APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY} \
JAVA_OPTS="${APP_SERVICE_JAVA_OPTS}"

Here is my environment variable for VM: APP_SERVICE_JAVA_OPTS="-javaagent:/home/site/wwwroot/applicationinsights-agent.jar -Dserver.port=80"

As you can see I have a path to applicationinsights-agent.jar which is the jar I copy myself during the deployment using config-zip deployment:

cp ./build/libs/app-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar ./deploymentrepo/app.jar
cp ./build/resources/main/applicationinsights-agent*.jar ./deploymentrepo/applicationinsights-agent.jar
cp ./build/resources/main/ApplicationInsights.json ./deploymentrepo/ApplicationInsights.json
cd ./deploymentrepo
zip target.zip -r ./*
az webapp deployment source config-zip \
  --src target.zip \
  -n ${ANALYTICS_APP_NAME} \
  -g ${ANALYTICS_GROUP_NAME}

My ApplicationInsights.json looks like that:

{
  "instrumentationSettings": {
    "preview": {
      "roleName": "ApplicationName",
      "heartbeat": {
        "intervalSeconds": 60
      },
      "instrumentation": {
        "logging": {
          "threshold": "INFO"
        },
        "micrometer": {
          "enabled": true
        }
      },
      "selfDiagnostics": {
        "destination": "file",
        "directory": "/var/log/applicationinsights",
        "level": "INFO",
        "maxSizeMB": 10
      }
    }
  }
}

How to properly connect Azure Application Insights to the App Service Spring Application with Azure CLI scripts?

1 Answers