Dependencies not showing in Application insights

[ObadahFahmy]

I understand that this issue is known and documented on the wiki here, but I could not find anywhere to discuss the issue.

Mainly I want to find out when this is likely to be looked into. We have a number of Azure Functions which call out to microservices and are unable to track slow request due to this.

Thanks

[ahmelsayed]

/cc @brettsam

I'm only familiar with Application Insights for tracking stuff in the browser. There it's pretty simple since it's all done automatically by AI's SDK since it can hook up to the browser's xhr pipeline. I'm not too sure what it means for non-browser apps. @brettsam do you think this is something that can be added at some point?

[brettsam]

We're looking into auto-tracking for Functions V2. Today, you can manually add and correlate dependencies from within a function yourself by following the steps here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-monitoring#custom-telemetry-in-c-functions.

[suppenburger]

Any date when the auto-tracking of dependencies for HttpClient calls will be available? Thanks!

[s-krawczyk]

+1

[brettsam]

HTTP dependency tracking has been added with PR Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk#1767. Our next v2 release will include this functionality.

[ObadahFahmy]

Is there any likelihood of this making it to functions V1? We have a number of V1 functions that we would like to use this for, unfortunately we can't use V2 as there a number of libraries we depend upon that have large issues with V2.

[ftsguy]

Can you guys add azure sql dependancy tracking as well ?

[tsahi]

A solution I'm thinking of for V1, but haven't implemented yet, is this:

1. Inherit System.Net.Http.WebRequestHandler
2. Override SendAsync(). in the override, add a call to TelemetryClient.TrackDependency(). Of course, you will have to initialize the DependencyTelemetry.Context as described here.
3. Give this to the HttpClient constructor.

[paulbatum]

We don't have plans to backport this to V1. I'm guessing your issues with V2 are libraries that don't run on .NET Core? If thats the case then I think you'll need to stick to manually tracking dependencies as Brett mentioned.

For SQL dependency tracking, I suggest you file a separate issue.

@brettsam can we close this issue now that the capability to do auto tracking is in place, and it really needs to be tracked at the per-dependency type level?

[danbyrne]

HI Paul,
I'm not sure that it will that easy for users of V1 functions to always use manually tracked dependencies... as an example, we are using API Management amongst our stack and I dont think we can pass the correlation IDs through APIM, so manual dependency tracking would not work (as I understand it)... so we should be going for automated dependency tracking, but as you say we cant do this with V1, and we have DLLs in use that are not V2 compatible.

[paulbatum]

@lmolkova do you know if there are issues with manually tracking dependencies when using Azure API Management? I do not have much context on APIM's integration with App Insights (if any).

[lmolkova]

@danbyrne I'm not aware of any issue related to manual dependencies tracking.

I believe APIM has a restful API and AppInsights should be able to auto-track such calls in C# v2 Azure Function.

The problem with propagation of the ids to APIM is not solved with auto-tracking in AppInsights anyway as APIM REST API supports x-ms-request-id header: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/troubleshooting-api-operations#Thex-ms-request-idheader which AppInsights don't properly support.

We are moving towards W3C distributed tracing and eventually we'll have a consistent story for correlation across Azure, but in the meantime, to correlate APIM operations and AppInsights telemetry, you'd need to inject x-ms-request manually (or perhaps via APIM Client lib). You may use the same value for this header and dependency.Id.

Here are some articles that may help understand AppInsights correlation schema and Custom dependency calls tracking

[marcoscheel]

My Azure Function V2 (c#) is currently running with the 1.0.24 SDK and I'm getting dependencies for HTTP and SQL (check this out link).

Now that we have dependency infos in AppInsights the question is how to control these values so the system doesn't run crazy. My function did 1 GB max befor the SDK switch. Now i have up to 10 GB per day (workday).

Any documentation how to get rid of some dependency calls? I tried host.json but nothing to configure here. Also the logging was set to default "information". But also no luck.

I use the azure blob client to upload about 2 million records a day. Due to the implementaion I get 2 million HTTP 200 and also 2 million HTTP 404 for checking an item exists :(

Maybe I get some insights if the docs are updated. Otherwise this would be a new issue. Let me know what to do.