'Application Insights Telemetry: can you track traces/events/etc. asynchronously?
I am a longtime user of Azure's Application Insights, and I use the TelemetryClient's TrackTrace() and TrackException() liberally in every enterprise application I write.
One thing that has always bothered me slightly is that these methods are synchronous. Since these methods communicate with an external API, it would seem there is an ever-present risk of blocking; e.g., if the network is down/slow, or if App Insights' own API is having issues.
In such cases, it seems possible (at least in theory) that an entire application could hang. In such cases, if they ever occur, I would like my applications to continue operating despite failing to trace within a reasonable time frame.
I've done some research online, and it appears that there is no built-in way to call these methods asynchronously. Do you know of any way to accomplish this? (Or.....does the App Insights API have an under-the-hood black-box way of automatically preventing these sorts of things?)
Of course, I know I could always wrap my calls in a Task (e.g., await Task.Run(() => myTelemetryClient.TrackTrace("my message")); (or write an async extension method that does this). I could also use a timer to cancel such a request. But it would be nice if there was a more integrated way of doing this.
Can anyone enlighten me? Is this really a potential problem that I should be concerned with? Or am I merely tilting at windmills?
Update: I just now saw this, which indicates that AI does indeed handle tracking in an asynchronous manner "under the hood". But how can this be reliable, given the truism that asynchronous operations really need to be made async all the way up and down the call stack in order to be blocking-proof?
Solution 1:[1]
Is this really a potential problem that I should be concerned with?
No. None of the TrackABC() methods communicate with any external API or do anything which would take a long time. Track() runs all telemetry initializers, and then queues the item into an in-memory queue.
While the built-in telemetry initializers are designed to finish quickly and make no I/O or HttpCalls, if a user adds a telemetryinitializer which makes an http call or something similar, then Yes, it'll affect you Track() calls. But with normal usage of TelemetryInitializers, this should not be a concern.
Solution 2:[2]
If it's anything like the JS API, the tracking events are placed in a queue then dequeued and sent (possibly in batches at configurable intervals) independently of the TrackXXX methods. Enqueuing an event can be synchronous, but the sending end of the process can operated asynchronously. The queue decouples the two from one another. – spender
I think @spender answered my question! Thanks!
Sources
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Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | cijothomas |
| Solution 2 | QBBryant |