Why am I seeing a large spike in Data ingestion from performance counter data?

Question

From looking at my Cost Management reports for Application Insights, I've noticed a large spike in data ingestion related to Performance Counters.

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However, I'm not seeing any significant correlation in the number of requests spiking for the same period.

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What can I do to understand the root cause of this issue?

Additional Information

After some debugging, I was able to get to the bottom of this.

The usage spiked on Sep 7 and Sep 8 and then tapered off on the 9th and 10th.

The change that I made on the 6th Sept was to upgrade Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore from version 2.6.1 to version 2.7.1. Version 2.7.1 has ILogger integration baked in.

So, what I believe happened is that, after deploying the upgraded version of Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore, I may have had the Logging verbosity turned up too high for the performance counter telemetry data and subsequently changed it a couple of days later when I noticed it.

I hope this helps someone else who may run into this issue!

Answer 1

There is now a cleaner way to achieve the disabling of the PerformanceCounterModule (and other modules which cause excessive/unneeded logging);

services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry(options =>
{
    options.EnablePerformanceCounterCollectionModule = false;
    options.InstrumentationKey = configuration["ApplicationInsights:InstrumentationKey"];
});