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I'm trying to fine tune my application insights cost, it's currently about 80% of the cost of running my service. When I look at the "usage and estimated costs" charts I can see most of my data volume is "message" but I can't find any information on what this actually means.

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My app is predominantly Azure Functions that interact with various queues, etc. I can't see a table in the Logs that represent this data so I'm a bit lost as to what this could be or how I might reduce the cost of this in app insights.

I could add samping, etc. but I'd prefer to understand the problem better before doing that.

So what exactly is a "message" in application insights and how can I view this raw data?

Liam
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A message is the same as a Trace, example can be seen in this screenshot (source):

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Azure functions generate a lot of trace telemetry. This document shows what kind of logging is send to the trace table in application insights. You can filter the telemetry but be aware that it might break some things like dependency logging. The log category list shows what is logged at what level. Use it as a guidance.

Peter Bons
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    Bit confusing that they seem to call it "message" in one place and "trace" somewhere else. – Liam Mar 12 '21 at 15:34
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    some of this is historic, or depends on what kind of service is generating the data and what it is called there. some of the sdks have `traceMessage` as a function, some have `trackTrace`. the underlying table name in app insights is literally `traces`, with a field `message`. – John Gardner Mar 13 '21 at 01:01