Application Insights (for Java): What is it and How to Get It

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I previously mentioned that Application Insights supports Java and this post is a follow-up with some more links and information. The official information page for Application Insights is here. Briefly stated, Application Insights is a way to get the same great Application Performance Monitoring (APM) available in SCOM 2012 R2 in the cloud. The agent itself has the same codebase as the SCOM 2012 R2 feature, the difference being the serialization code at the end sends the performance information to a different location to a REST interface.

The Application Insight feature is presently preview-only. To gain access to this feature create a Visual Studio Online account and choose the Application Insights tile in your account page.

The officially supported platforms are:

  • Tomcat (5.5, 6, 7)
  • JBoss Application Server 6

Unofficially, it is possible to get some level of monitoring from most any Java application because the means of instrumenting the Java process is done via the java.lang.instrument package. While the data may not be as rich as the above supported platforms, there will be some information available and I will detail how to do this is a future blog post.

Wrapping up, here are some external links that will be of interest.  The general feature description of Application Insights are available on MSDN, with the Java installation notes available here. In addition, the Application Insight forum is available here.