Many developers today are turning to Microsoft Azure for their application solutions for so many good reasons. Azure offers Visual Studio App Center which enables developers to automate and manage the lifecycle of their iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps, ship apps more frequently, at higher-quality, and with greater confidence.
This integrated cloud tool also allows for the collection and analysis of telemetry. With telemetry data, developers can understand how users interact with their applications, know how many active users their applications have, what features are being used, and how often they monitor application performance. Here is a guide to collating telemetry with Azure App Center.
Before you can create an account and sign up with App Center, you must have an Azure subscription, and your app must be either iOS, Android, Xamarin, Universal Windows, or React Native.
The next step is to onboard your mobile app to App Center, which will enable you to use Application Insights. Since Application Insights does not receive telemetry from mobile apps directly, custom event telemetry will be sent to the App Center instead. In turn, the App Center will export copies of these custom events into Application Insights as the events are received.
Once your app is onboarded to App Center, modify it to send custom event telemetry using the App Center SDK. Custom events are the only category of App Center telemetry that is exported to Application Insights. Use the trackEvent in the App Center SDK to send custom events. To ensure your custom events are being received, check the Events tab under the Analytics section in App Center.
After ensuring that your app is sending custom events and these events are being received by App Center, create an App Center-type Application Insights resource in the Azure portal. To do this, sign in to the Azure portal, select Create a resource > Developer tools > Application Insights, fill in the configuration box with the required information and click create. Create a separate Applications Insights resource for each platform if your app supports multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, etc.
Next, activate the export feature in the App Center to facilitate the transfer of each custom event to Application Insights. The transfer process can take several minutes, so if the events don’t appear immediately on the Application Insights Overview page, wait a bit before diagnosing further.
Lastly, after successfully exporting the custom events to Application Insights, you can commence monitoring your app’s usage and performance. With Application Insights, you can query, segment, and filter your app’s custom events telemetry while also analyzing your app’s user conversion, retention, and navigation patterns, using enhanced analytics tools.
Azure App Center is an all-inclusive solution that allows developers to quickly build high-grade apps and provide excellent mobile and desktop app experiences whilst enabling automated tests and distribution. It also helps developers to collect real-time diagnostic data, track usage patterns, user adoption, and other engagement metrics, and aggregate critical insights on user behaviours. Contact us if you need additional help on setting up your telemetry strategy!