How to create customized logs with new columns rather than traces and requests etc in Azure Applications Insights?

Question

We are creating a POC to use Azure Applications Insights with WebAPI application.

We have added a telemetrykey to the webapi and we can see logs in Azure insights trace and requests tabs.

However, what we would like to do is rather than using the existing trace and requests provided by Azure, we would like to create our own tab say "OurCustomLog" and we would like to create own columns like 'CreatedDate', 'TransactionId', 'LogDetails', 'StatusCode', 'LoggingApplicationName', 'CallingApplicationName' etc and then we can filter based on for example, statusCode or TransactionId etc.

Is this possible with Azure Application Insights? or Are there different services in Azure we should use instead of Azure Insights?

Thank you in advance,

Kind regards,

Answer 1

This is all possible. I'd say the best thing to do is create Azure Monitor Workbooks. Based on the existing logs you can create queries to transform and rename the data. You can add tabs, visualizations and filters to your liking.

To see the default workbooks and create new ones browse to your App Insights Resources and select Workbooks in the left side menu in the category Monitoring

When creating queries you can map columns name like this:

requests
| project CreatedDate = timestamp

or you rename them in the workbook itself.

The other options is writing and sharing custom queries.