Searching Application Insights Data inside Visual Studio 2015

If you are using the Application Insights, you must be familiar with searching Application Insights data inside Azure Portal.  In this case, whenever you want to search some telemetry data for your application, you must have navigated to Azure Portal, then select the specific Application Insights and then use the search option to find out any specific set of data. While this is great but you may need to back and forth with the Visual Studio and Azure Portal during the analysis, debug of the applications. Well, To enhance the developer experience and productivity the similar  search features has been introduced with in Visual Studio 2015 update 1 RC.

Open an instance of Visual Studio, from the main menu, navigation to View –> Other Windows –>  Search Applications Insights . This will bring the “Application Insights Search” window dialog.

Make sure you have VS 2015 Update 1 RC installed !!

Once you connected with your Azure Account, it will list out all the associated Application Insights for that account as shown in below image.

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

Select the specific Application Insights you are looking for and hit the search button. That’s it. Visual Studio will pull down all the telemetry data for the specified time range.

At very first look, this gives very similar to the search experience as we have in the web portal for Application Insights.

Custom search :

If you want search any specific events, request you can filter out by specifying the search text. As shown in below image event filtered based on “Register” text.

Filtering based on time range :

Similar to the web experience you can customize and filter the time rage for specific request as shown in below snap.

Set the Custom Time Range

Removing specific types of data :

You can close specific type from the search window when you are interested to a specific type. for an example, for a web application you want to view only Request and Page View type data you can remove reset of the types.

View the details :

Last but not the least and most important one… Select any of the rows to get the details information for the telemetry

Hit the Reset button for rest the search and filter information .

All in all, this is a great addition for the developer that will definitely improve the productivity and experience.