CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#azureazure-functionsazure-application-insightssystem.net
ObiEff
ObiEff

Reputation: 650

Tracking outgoing requests in Azure Functions

As part of a Microservice based solution that we are building we have a number of Azure Functions sitting in one Azure Function App. The functions Orchestrate numerous requests to different APIs some of which take a long time to complete. We added Application Insights to the functions to allow for some tracking of the requests made, but dependency tracking is not working yet in Azure Functions. It is possible to manually track dependencies but that involves inserting some tracking code around each dependency call, however we want to avoid manually tracking dependencies on each and every call.

One of the solutions I have thought of would be to create a request tracker that tracks all outgoing web requests from the functions. Within the request tracker I could then track the dependency requests including their time. I want to hook the request tracker into some sort of web traffic handler, unfortunately I was unable to find much about doing this. A lot of posts mention using System.Net trace writer for this, but as far as I can see this requires a Web.config to setup and functions do not have one.

I have seen a few posts mentioning to create a request wrapper and place that on my outgoing requests, but unfortantely that is not an option as we use a number of packages that make requests internally. If you have any ideas that could get me going in the right direction please let me know. Thanks

Update:

I added the following helper method which allows me to manually track tasks as dependency requests

 public static async Task<T> TrackDependency<T>(this Task<T> task, string dependecyName, string callName, string operationId)
    {
        var telemtryClient = new TelemetryClient();
        var startTime = DateTime.UtcNow;
        var timer = System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch.StartNew();
        var success = true;
        T result = default(T);
        try
        {
            result = await task;
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            success = false;
        }
        finally
        {
            timer.Stop();
            var dependencyTelemetry = new DependencyTelemetry(dependecyName, callName, startTime, timer.Elapsed, success);
            dependencyTelemetry.Context.Operation.Id = operationId;
            telemtryClient.Track(dependencyTelemetry);
        }
        return result;
    }

It can then be used as follows:

client.Accounts.UpdateWithHttpMessagesAsync(accountId, account).TrackDependency("Accounts", "UpdateAccounts", requestContextProvider.CorrelationId);

I can now see individual request dependencies in Application Insights, but obviously the actual telemetry on them is very limited, it does not contain path info or much else.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1827

Answers (1)

Drew Marsh
Drew Marsh

Reputation: 33379

So when you say dependency tracking is not working in Azure Functions, what exactly do you mean? Have you actually added and configured the Application Insights SDK to your actual function yet? The out-of-the-box monitoring experience with Azure Functions doesn't automatically add dependency tracing, but if you actually add/configure the Application Insights SDK in your function project it should start tracking everything going on in there.

Upvotes: 1

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