Adding Telemetry to My Web App with Azure Application Insights

Before I point my domain abdulkoomson.com to my current live site, which is hosted at abdulkoomson.azurewebsites.net (on Azure’s free tier), I want to understand how users interact with my site.

That means adding telemetry—specifically, tracking how visitors navigate, what pages they visit, and how long they stay. To do that, I integrated Azure Monitor Application Insights using the JavaScript SDK for real user monitoring.

🔍 What I Want to Measure

• Page views
• User navigation paths
• Session duration and bounce rates
• Application availability and response times

While Azure Monitor provides full-stack observability, I’m primarily focused right now on the frontend telemetry—especially page views and user engagement before I officially launch with my domain.

🛠️ Implementation: JavaScript SDK

To enable real user monitoring, I added the Azure Application Insights JavaScript SDK to my site. This lets me capture telemetry directly from the client side without needing any backend dependencies.

Here's the basic code snippet I added to my main HTML file:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var appInsights = window.appInsights || function (config) {
      function r(config) {
          t[config] = function () {
              var i = arguments;
              t.queue.push(function () {
                  t[config].apply(t, i);
              });
          };
      }
      var t = { config: config }, u = document, e = window, o = "script", s = u.createElement(o), i, f;
      s.src = config.url || "https://az416426.vo.msecnd.net/scripts/a/ai.0.js";
      u.getElementsByTagName(o)[0].parentNode.appendChild(s);
      t.cookie = u.cookie;
      t.queue = [];
      i = ["trackPageView", "trackEvent", "trackException", "trackMetric", "trackDependencyData", "trackTrace", "setAuthenticatedUserContext", "clearAuthenticatedUserContext", "flush"];
      for (f = 0; f < i.length; f++) r(i[f]);
      return t;
  }({
      instrumentationKey: "YOUR_INSTRUMENTATION_KEY"
  });

  window.appInsights = appInsights;
  appInsights.trackPageView();
</script>

You can generate this snippet directly from Azure Portal when setting up Application Insights for your web app.

📊 Benefits of App Insights

Here’s what I like about Application Insights so far:

• Works with static and dynamic sites (including Flask)
• Tracks page views out of the box
• Collects telemetry like response time, failed requests, and JS errors
• Easy integration with Azure Dashboards and Power BI
• Customizable events for advanced use cases

🔒 Privacy & Lightweight Loading

I made sure telemetry collection complies with basic privacy considerations—nothing invasive or PII-based. You can control what data is captured and anonymize IPs if needed.

📈 Next Steps

• Review metrics on user engagement weekly
• Map user flows to see how people navigate between blog posts
• Use data to improve layout, navigation, and content organization
• Upgrade my hosting plan and connect my domain: abdulkoomson.com

💬 Final Thoughts

Telemetry is like a feedback loop for your website—it tells you what’s working, what’s not, and what users actually care about. With Azure Application Insights in place, I now have a lens into how people move through my content before I make anything permanent.

Got tips on improving user analytics or want help setting up Application Insights? Let’s chat.