News

Microsoft SDK Provides App Metrics to Java Devs

• By Michael Domingo
• March 10, 2015

Microsoft released the Java SDK for Application Insights at EclipseCon in San Francisco.

The service helps cloud and Web developers glean insights from Java application health and usage metrics.

Originally released as an instrumenting service in Visual Studio 2013, Application Insights has since gone through numerous iterations and improvements, now offering more granularized application monitoring and telemetric information for Visual Studio 2013 and newer apps, whether they reside on-premises or in a Microsoft Azure cloud (via Visual Studio Online). It allows for tracking of page views, sessions or users to a Web page through a simple script embedded into a Web page. It can also track HTTP requests, and it has hooks for writing customized telemetry through an Application Insights API.

The Java SDK for Application Insights means that usage and health statistics can be gathered for any Java application. Just add the SDK to the Java application to monitor app response times, numbers of user requests, and app performance alerts. Adding the SDK to client-side Web pages allows for monitoring of page views, sessions, return rates and browser types. The SDK can also take advantage of the API, which means developers can use it to create customized telemetry services.

Microsoft Senior Program Manager Harel Broitman wrote in a blog post about some specific examples of each feature on Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management.

Coincidentally, Microsoft last month released an Azure plug-in for Eclipse that includes support for Application Insights, which in turn offers similar telemetry capabilities to the SDK.