Preventing specific exceptions from being logged to App Insights

Question

This is a long shot and there doesnt seem to be anything close on Google, but I was wondering if it possible to prevent certain exceptions from being logged to App Insights?

There are a lot of places in our code base where exceptions were raised for user actions that are not really exceptions that we want to show in App Insights.

However, changing all the areas where this occurs would take use a long time and would require a lot of testing as we would need to make sure that the flow of logic is not changed

At the moment we raise exceptions of type LocationDomainException, Im thinking that if I come across somewhere where we dont want to log the exception, we can change to LocationDomainUserError

I would need to stop this exception, or any exception inheriting from it from being logged

Im using .NET Core 3.1.

I appreciate this is a bit of an anti pattern, but has anyone ever tried it?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use a Telemetry Processor:

public class CustomTelemetryFilter : ITelemetryProcessor
    {
        private readonly ITelemetryProcessor _next;

        public CustomTelemetryFilter(ITelemetryProcessor next)
        {
            _next = next;
        }

        public void Process(ITelemetry item)
        {
            // Example: process all exceptions except LocationDomainException
            var isSomeException = item is ExceptionTelemetry ex && ex.Exception is LocationDomainException;

            if (!isSomeException)
                _next.Process(item); // Process the item
            else
            {
                // Item is dropped here
            }
        }
    }

Register the processor using services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetryProcessor<CustomTelemetryFilter>();