Getting an Application Insights Instrumentation Key inside Visual Studio itself

Getting an Application Insights Instrumentation Key inside Visual Studio itself

Instrumentation Key is the key integration point between your application and the Application Insights.  This key is essential for sending the application telemetry data back to azure. If you create the Application Insights directly using Visual Studio; Visual Studio takes care of linking between your application and the key. If you create the Application Insights in portal first and then want to integrate with your apps, then you may need to do this link manually.

If you want to do a manual integration;  you have to obtain the Application Insights Instrumentation Key and In the past I have showed how  to get the instrumentation key from the portal . Below screenshot shows the quick reference of it.

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Now, here is the interesting part,  you can view the instrumentation key directly from the Visual Studio by using the Cloud Explorer Extension.  If you are working with Azure, this tool must be very much familiar with you.  You can launch it from View –> Cloud Explorer.

Must Read : Using Application Insights right from the Visual Studio 2015

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Once Launch, it would required for your first time authentication with your azure account.

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Related Post : How to get number of Application Insights events from Visual Studio 2015?

Once the authentication is successfully  along with your other azure resources such as Storage Accounts, Stream Jobs, Virtual Machine etc. you will get list of all of your Application Insights.

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Select the respective Application Insights from the list, and you can now jump into Portal or Search Windows (  Well this is a new addition for find the search … with my previous blog post .. here   Different ways to launch the Application Insights Search Window in Visual Studio ) .

Move to Properties Tab, and there you will have Instrumentation key along with other common properties.

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You can take advantage of this utility to easily get common properties for a specific Application Insights.

Abhijit Jana

Abhijit runs the Daily .NET Tips. He started this site with a vision to have a single knowledge base of .NET tips and tricks and share post that can quickly help any developers . He is a Former Microsoft ASP.NET MVP, CodeProject MVP, Mentor, Speaker, Author, Technology Evangelist and presently working as a .NET Consultant. He blogs at http://abhijitjana.net , you can follow him @AbhijitJana . He is the author of book Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide.

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