Application Insights Telemetry Metrics

Question

Sitecore 9 on Azure PaaS comes with App Insights as a default. Out of the box, there are a bunch of metrics captured. This counts for a lot of data that comes at a cost. Even a clean install with no traffic reaches the default daily cap. This can be increased but comes at a cost.

Sitecore wrote an article https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up_and_maintaining/sitecore_on_azure/analytics/configure_application_insights_post_deployment to describe how to tweak you app insights.

I would like to reduce the metrics being measured under the counterLoader/includedCounters node. Does someone have experience with this? Which metrics are actually usefull and should definitly be retained, which one are more nice to haves? I know this is can depend on the kind of project but if there are any general guidelines, I would welcome them.

Answer 1

I never seen a list with usefull metrics. I discussed with Azure Team few months ago and they mention me to disabled GetChangesAvgTime counter.

One specific counter, GetChangesAvgTime, logged multiple times a second that can be disabled. It is related to change tracking on XDB search index worker.

To disable this specific counter please follow next steps:

1. Edit file on XP0 XConnect role or XP1 collectionsearch role \App_data\jobs\continuous\IndexWorker\App_data\Diagnostics\Sitecore.Xdb.Collection.Counters.json

2. Find the specific counter (231) GetChangesAvgTime and (232) GetChangeAvgTimeBase.

3. Remove or comment out the following lines

   {
   
    "CounterIndex": 231,
   
    "CounterName": "GetChangesAvgTime",
   
    "CounterDescription": "Get Changes average time elapsed time in milliseconds",
   
   "CounterType": "AverageCount64"
   
   },
   
   {
   
   "CounterIndex": 232,
   
   "CounterName": "GetChangesAvgTimeBase",
   
   "CounterDescription": "Get Changes average time elapsed time in milliseconds Base",
   
    "CounterType": "AverageBase"
   
    }
   

Answer 2

Just expanding on Vlad's answer in light of new information - in Sitecore 9.1.0 they have removed a fair few counters. In comparison with 9.0.2 they have removed:

Sitecore.Xdb.Collection.Counters.json

• 228, 229, 232, 233, 270 to 275

Sitecore.Xdb.MarketingAutomation.Counters.json

• 2118 - 2121
• However they have added a few dozen too here.

Sitecore.Cloud.ApplicationInsights.config

• No changes to the counters although they have made it much easier to disable all application insights telemetry - this can be done via web.config.