Revisited March 2020

An Azure solution I was working on had a .Net console application which ran on a server at the customer’s premises. It was scheduled task that uploaded some files to azure blob storage every 5 minutes.

To help with debugging I added support for Azure application Insights but after monitoring the application for a while I noticed some shutdown events were not getting uploaded.

Initially I was a bit confused because when I ran the application on my desktop it worked fine (It works on my machine). I found this was because when launched from the debugger the application would upload any files it found then wait until I pressed to exit and this was enough time for the shutdown messages to get uploaded.

The code for a smallest example application is below (I pass the instrumentation key as a command line parameter).

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Copyright (c) 2018, devMobile Software
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
//     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
using System;
using Microsoft.ApplicationInsights;
using Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility;

namespace devMobile.Azure.ApplicationInsightsClientConsole
{
   class Program
   {
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         if (args.Length != 1)
         {
            Console.WriteLine("Command line argument InstrumentationKey missing");
            return;
         }
         TelemetryConfiguration.Active.InstrumentationKey = args[0];

         TelemetryClient telemetryClient = new TelemetryClient();

         telemetryClient.TrackTrace("This is Application Insights native");

         telemetryClient.TrackTrace("Application startup");

         // application does stuff

         telemetryClient.TrackTrace("Application shutdown");

         telemetryClient.Flush();
      }
   }
}

Sample project AzureApplicationInsightsClientConsole