In its latest nod to cross-platform application development, Microsoft has opened its Visual Studio Application Insights cloud software telemetry service to Java developers.

The software giant announced the new Applications Insights SDK for Java in time for the EclipseCon North America 2015 conference, taking place in San Francisco this week.

Application Insights, part of the Visual Studio Online set of services that Redmond announced in November 2013, gathers and generates reports on usage and performance data for online applications.

Developers and IT admins access the reports via a dashboard that's integrated into the Microsoft Azure Portal – which means you need an Azure subscription to use Application Insights, though a free trial is available.

Previously, the service only offered hooks for connecting to web applications and apps written using Microsoft's own ASP.Net framework. The new SDK allows developers to add the same kind of monitoring to Java applications.

They'll need to bring their own IDEs to do the actual coding in, though – such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, JDeveloper, or NetBeans. Microsoft's support for Java still doesn't extend to the Visual Studio IDE itself, although it does provide a number of tools for Java developers via Visual Studio Online.

Fortunatley, Redmond has thrown Java devs one more bone, too: support for Application Insights is baked into the new version of the Azure Tookit for Eclipse – a free product maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies – which will also be made available at EclipseCon over the next few days.

Java code also needs to be running on the Oracle JRE version 1.6 or later before it can be instrumented for Application Insights.

Once an application is properly wired up, however, admins can use the Application Insights dashboard to poll data on a variety of metrics, including the number of requests served, server response time, the average time to process requests, and overall application usage over time.

Developers can also add custom metrics and track events and exceptions by adding simple calls to the Application Insights SDK to their code. More details about how developers can integrate their code with the SDK are available here.

A free trial of Application Insights is available. After that, pricing depends on the level of Visual Studio Online service you need and the amount of Azure resources you consume each month.

Application Insights won't be limited to web, ASP.Net, and Java developers for long, either. In December, Microsoft quietly scooped up German startup HockeyApp – which marketed a testing and analytics service for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and OS X apps – with the aim of integrating it into Application Insights in the near future. ®