Application insight NLog target

Question

I have console application from which I want to send custom events to my Application Insight. I want to use Application Insight NLog target (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.NLogTarget/) but it's not working. I tried to set it via .config file and tried to set it manually:

    var config = new LoggingConfiguration();
    ConfigurationItemFactory.Default.Targets.RegisterDefinition("ai", typeof(ApplicationInsightsTarget));
    ApplicationInsightsTarget aiTarget = new ApplicationInsightsTarget();
    aiTarget.InstrumentationKey = "my_key";
    aiTarget.Name = "aiTarget";
    LoggingRule rule = new LoggingRule("*", LogLevel.Info, aiTarget);
    config.AddTarget("aiTarget", aiTarget);
    config.LoggingRules.Add(rule);
    LogManager.Configuration = config;

but still nothing, I can't see my exceptions or events in application insights. Any ideas?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 09 '16 at 00:48

I assume you followed documentation here (which is pretty close to what you implemented):

var config = new LoggingConfiguration();

ApplicationInsightsTarget target = new ApplicationInsightsTarget();
// You need this only if you did not define InstrumentationKey in ApplicationInsights.config or want to use different instrumentation key
target.InstrumentationKey = "Your_Resource_Key";

LoggingRule rule = new LoggingRule("*", LogLevel.Trace, target);
config.LoggingRules.Add(rule);

LogManager.Configuration = config;

Logger logger = LogManager.GetLogger("Example");

logger.Trace("trace log message");

Then, I'd double check with Fiddler if anything gets sent out of the box to dc.services.visualstudio.com and what's the response code. That might give a clue about the issue if the problem is indeed with the transport but not collection.

If the issue is in collection, you can troubleshoot it locally with PerfView and other Diagnostics tools.

PerfView command to collect AI traces would look like:

PerfView.exe /onlyProviders=*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-Extensibility-Web,*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-Web,*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-Core,*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-Extensibility-DependencyCollector,*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-Extensibility-Rtia-SharedCore,*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-Extensibility-WindowsServer,*Microsoft-ApplicationInsights-WindowsServer-TelemetryChannel collect

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 28 '17 at 08:26

For my console application, I have read "INSTRUMENTATIONKEY" from App.config at run time.

So first I added "APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY" as a key at App.config.

<appSettings>
    ....
    <add key="APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY" value="your key" />
    ....
</appSettings>

Then read and set this key at Main function by adding below lines.

var key = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY"];   
Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility.TelemetryConfiguration.Active.InstrumentationKey = key;

Then at the end of you Main function or in your closing function add a thread.sleep for giving some time to send data to Application Insights.

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(70000);

Application insight NLog target

2 Answers2