Some interesting points regarding automated deployment of Alert Rules within an Azure Resource Group template

After some recent endeavours to add Application Insights alert rules, I stumbled (quite sorely) over some quirks around defining Alert Rules within an ARM template:

1) When copying an existing definition out of the Azure portal, there will be a "hidden-link:..." prefixed tag in the tags section of the resource definition. Normally tags are simply extra metadata, but in the case of Application Insights and its related artifacts, the "hidden-link:" tag is actually a functional requirement. You can't delete it! Otherwise, the ARM template deployment will throw a very unhelpful 'Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Management.Monitoring.MonitoringServiceException' with no further details.

2) When defining Alert Rules on custom metrics, those metrics must *already* exist within the existing Application Insights instance. Otherwise, as above, the ARM template deployment will throw a very unhelpful 'Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Management.Monitoring.MonitoringServiceException' with no further details. The consequence of this is that you won't be able to define such alert rules when deploying a new resource group using the ARM template for the first time! Otherwise, it will fail and you'll be unable to execute the resource group deployment step.

Automating setup of keys for Release Annotations in App Insights during an automated Release

Microsoft has finally added this ability, though the documentation is not available at the time of this writing. For instructions on how to do it, see this UserVoice item for the issue :

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/357324-application-insights/suggestions/13607550-enable-creation-and-management-of-api-keys-via-pow?tracking_code=06b602f1fc962c339ed8bcf534fcdb2f#{toggle_previous_statuses}

Logging your application with App Insights instead of Windows Azure Diagnostics

We've recently started deploying applications to Microsoft Azure. Unfortunately, we don't use Cloud Apps for our web apps, and instead use MSDeploy on the command line to enable automated deployment. Consequently, we don't have any .csdef files in which to implement Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD).

Fortunately, there's a suitable replacement for applications in Azure App Service (rather than Cloud Services): Application Insights. Not only does this provide a TraceListener for tracing your application, but also provides a whole suite of other useful diagnostics, making this something that you should really be using anyway.  Using the links here and here, I was able to get up to speed with App Insights within an hour and a half, and implement a working solution for our application.