Application Insights - Undefined Cloud Role Name with 2.4.0-beta3

Question

We're trying out the app insights multi role preview as announced here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/app-insights-microservices/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-insights/app-insights-monitor-multi-role-apps#use-cloudrolename-to-separate-components

We've added the 2.4.0-beta3 packages for appinsights & appinsights.windowsserver as the app we're using is hosted on prem (IIS) currently.

Our cloud_rolename seems to be undefined in our request telemetry. Is there anything further we need to do other than updating the packages?

We also found this:

AzureRoleEnvironmentTelemetryInitializer updates the RoleName and RoleInstance properties of the Device context for all telemetry items with information extracted from the Azure runtime environment.

..though our Cloud_RoleInstance property is being properly populated.

Answer 1

For ASP.NET apps, I had to assign Cloud.RoleName using a custom ITelemetryInitializer to assign ITelemetry.Context.Cloud.RoleName property which will assign the proper context for a given request when using multi-component apps.

Telemetry Initializer for Multi-Component Apps

  public class MultiComponentTelemetryInitializer : ITelemetryInitializer
  {
    public void Initialize(ITelemetry telemetry)
    {
        var requestTelemetry = telemetry as RequestTelemetry;
        if (requestTelemetry?.Context?.Cloud == null) return;
        requestTelemetry.Context.Cloud.RoleName = "myapp-api";
    }
  }

This initializer only works on the server side APIs - I have not found the equivalent hook for the client JS SDK.