Archive for the ‘Azure’ Category

Querying Application Insights for AppCenter Events and Metadata with Kusto KQL

Posted: July 3, 2023 in Azure, Development, Microsoft, Mobile
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I log a lot of event data in Microsoft AppCenter. Thousands of events per day. Unfortunately, AppCenter has a hard limit of 200 distinct custom events for their event data. So, when you look at that great event filter they have, you’re not actually seeing all the data. HOWEVER, that does NOT mean AppCenter is limited to a scant 200 events. Hardly. Behind the scenes, AppCenter is powered by Application Insights. As long as you have storage available, you can keep all your events in App Insights. The problems I ran into were:

  1. I didn’t know Kusto, or KQL, the query language used by App Insights, and
  2. It’s not obvious how to access all the metadata I log for each event.

What’s metadata, you may ask? Well, it’s the additional data you log alongside an event. In AppCenter, the term for metadata is Properties, but I digress. For example, if you’re logging an Software Update Success or Failure, you may also include metadata about a product ID, model number, firmware version, and so forth. Finding the event data is easy. Finding and reporting on the metadata is not so straightforward.

So, dear reader, I have an example query for you. You can copy & paste this into your App Insights query editor and be good to go.

So here’s the query I used to extract a summary of how many software updates succeeded, for specific model numbers, with a count by model number:

customEvents
| where name in ("Software Update: Succeeded")
| extend jsonData = tostring(parse_json(tostring(customDimensions.Properties)).['Model Number'])
| where jsonData in ("model1", "model2", "model3", "model4")
| summarize count() by jsonData

So what’s happening here? Let me explain:

customEvents

This is the table App Insights stores all events sent by AppCenter.
| where name in ("Software Update Succeeded")

This filters those events by the event name.
| extend jsonData = tostring(parse_json(tostring(customDimensions.Properties)).['Model Number'])

This converts the metadata field – aka customDimensions.Properties – from JSON, extracts a particular metadata field – in this case, Model Number – and then returns that metadata value as a string.
| where jsonData in ("model1", "model2", "model3", "model4")

This is a simple filter query. I found if I wanted to get all model numbers I could simply use the following, though your mileage may vary:

| where jsonData !in ("")

And then finally:
| summarize count() by jsonData

This takes the results, by model number, and summarizes with counts. App Insights will even automatically generate a graph for you!

Refining the query above, and as you use more extend keywords to extract more data, you may want to use a more meaningful variable name than jsonData 😁 For example, here’s a more robust query I wrote, identifying the unique counts by total number of users performing the action:

customEvents
| where name in ("Software Update: Succeeded")
| where timestamp > ago(30d)
| extend modelNumber = tostring(parse_json(tostring(customDimensions.Properties)).['Model Number'])
| extend modelName = case(
modelNumber == "model1", "Headphones",
modelNumber == "model2", "Soundbars",
modelNumber == "model3", "Powered Speakers",
"n/a")
| where modelNumber !in ("")
| summarize count() by user_Id, modelName
| summarize count() by modelName

The two summarize filters let me break things down by total number of users with total number of product models. Here you can see how I used proper variable names and used the other useful customEvents data. This also helps me get data similar to the cool, useful graphs AppCenter shows on their dashboard.

You can do a lot more with this data, but it should get you started. I hope it helps you as it did me.

Additional tip:

Application Insights only stores data for 30 days by default. If you want to retain and report on your events beyond that timeframe, make sure you update your App Insights instance settings.

How To: Access Azure MFA Settings and Trusted IPs Without Azure Subscription

Posted: July 7, 2017 in Azure, Microsoft, Uncategorized
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Have you been wondering how to access the Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Settings in the Azure Classic Portal without first having to create an Azure account? I figured this out a few days ago, having an Office 365 tenant, and wanting to use the EMS and Azure Active Directory Premium features. Following Microsoft’s instructions, it said to go to the Azure Classic Portal. The problem is, Office 365 doesn’t include an Azure subscription, it just includes Azure Active Directory, which you manage through the “modern” Azure portal. Unfortunately, the Trusted IPs and MFA capabilities are managed through the Azure Classic Portal, which you can’t directly access without an Azure subscription.

So, here’s what you do:

  1. Go to portal.office.com
  2. Click Admin to open the admin tools
  3. In the search box, type MFA
  4. Select the Multi-factor authentication search result
  5. Click the link to open the Manage multi-factor authentication link
  6. There you go – manage MFA in your Azure AD to your heart’s content!

 

Custom DLLs not loading in Azure? Might be a PATH issue… Here’s a fix.

Posted: September 25, 2015 in Azure, Microsoft, Programming, Software Development
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I recently ran into a need to use the LAME MP3 encoder in a customer’s website. Problem was, once I deployed to Azure, I received an error of “Unable to load DLL libmp3lame.32.dll”. Uh oh! “But it’s in the bin folder!” I screamed silently at Starbucks. So, I binged the issue and found a good answer on StackOverflow. I’m sharing here because it helped unstick me, and I imagine others may be running to this issue with libraries other than LAME.

I ended up adding the function to my Global.asax, in addition to importing namespaces System.IO and System.Linq:

/// <summary>
/// Updates PATH variable in hosting instance to allow referring to items in this project's /bin folder.
/// Very helpful with Azure.
/// </summary>
public static void CheckAddBinPath()
{
    // find path to 'bin' folder
    var binPath = Path.Combine(new string[] { AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "bin" });
    // get current search path from environment
    var path = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH") ?? "";
 
    // add 'bin' folder to search path if not already present
    if (!path.Split(Path.PathSeparator).Contains(binPath, StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))
    {
        path = string.Join(Path.PathSeparator.ToString(), new string[] { path, binPath });
        Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", path);
    }
}

Then in Application start I simply added:

// Sometimes files aren't loaded properly from bin. Hint to the app to load from /bin, too.
CheckAddBinPath();

I hope that helps!