Today at the Connect() 2016 event in New York, we announced the general availability of Azure Application Insights (previously Visual Studio Application Insights) and launched our new pricing structure. With this announcement, Application Insights now provides a financially backed SLA offering 99.9% availability.

Application Insights is an integrated application performance management (APM) and application analytics solution. It enables development teams to understand how application performance relates to user experience and how these impact business outcomes.

If you are new to Application Insights, here is a quick overview and demo:

The main areas of Application Insights are:

Intelligent APM : Proactively monitor and improve the performance of the application you’re developing with advanced tools. Visual application maps pinpoint performance issues. Smart detection based on machine learning sends you alerts with embedded diagnostics. With Live Metrics Stream you can monitor your application health metrics in real time, while you’re deploying a change.

: Proactively monitor and improve the performance of the application you’re developing with advanced tools. Visual application maps pinpoint performance issues. Smart detection based on machine learning sends you alerts with embedded diagnostics. With Live Metrics Stream you can monitor your application health metrics in real time, while you’re deploying a change. Analytics : With its rich query language, Analytics gives you answers to complex questions about your application’s performance and usage, almost instantly. Ask creative questions about the performance and behavior of your apps in flexible ways with interactive queries, and refine them until you pin-point the problem that impedes a desired business outcome. Once you derive an insight from the ad-hoc queries, you can share them in the form of visuals across your organization in customizable dashboards or through integration with Power BI.

: With its rich query language, Analytics gives you answers to complex questions about your application’s performance and usage, almost instantly. Ask creative questions about the performance and behavior of your apps in flexible ways with interactive queries, and refine them until you pin-point the problem that impedes a desired business outcome. Once you derive an insight from the ad-hoc queries, you can share them in the form of visuals across your organization in customizable dashboards or through integration with Power BI. DevOps Integration &Extensibility: Tightly integrated into the Visual Studio product family. Read performance data right there in the code of your app in Visual Studio IDE. Integrations with Visual Studio Team Services, Team Foundation Server, and GitHub enable you to find and fix quality issues early in your DevOps workflows. Integrations with System Center and Operations Management Suite enable you to share application performance and system performance metrics across team boundaries and shorten the time to find root causes of issues.

As part of being generally available, we have introduced a new pricing structure. You can still start for free with Application Insights, and there is no limitation on the APM and Analytics tools – you get the full feature set without cost. You only pay as your app grows and as you transmit more application telemetry to Application Insights, but you control how much you pay!

In addition, we are announcing these new features and enhancements to Application Insights, that we are proud to share these with you today.

We are continuously adding new capabilities to Application Insights and learning from our customers to better address your needs. We are fully committed to Azure Privacy standards and Security & Compliance policies, so that your data remains safe.

I would like to conclude with some inspiring words from one of our customers, AkzoNobel, a global paint firm, with whom we recently published a case study:

“With Application Insights, our attention has been directed multiple times to issues that would otherwise have taken much longer to detect. As a result, we’ve been able to maintain the service levels required for our application.”

--Rob Reijers, Manager ColorApps Development, AkzoNobel