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Visualizations & Workbooks are a key component of the App Insights experience. They enable customers to monitor performance / failure trends & debug issues as they occur. 


 


While performance data is critical to understanding the health of your application by itself it lacks the full context to help you understand why performance issues may be happening. Release Annotations are a simple way to add context & quantify the impact of an Azure DevOps release on your metrics. 


 

 

Annotations.png


 


Annotations can be automatically created by the Azure Pipelines build system. You can also create annotations to flag any event you like by creating them from PowerShell.


 


If your subscription has an Application Insights resource linked to it and you use one of the following deployment tasks, then you don’t need to configure anything else.


 











































Task code Task name Versions
AzureAppServiceSettings Azure App Service Settings Any
AzureRmWebAppDeployment Azure App Service deploy V3 and above
AzureFunctionApp Azure Functions Any
AzureFunctionAppContainer Azure Functions for container Any
AzureWebAppContainer Azure Web App for Containers Any
AzureWebApp Azure Web App Any

 


You can also write custom annotations by using an inline PowerShell script.


 


Release annotations are a feature of the cloud-based Azure Pipelines service of Azure DevOps & only available for Azure DevOps repos today.


 


If you’re using the App Insights release task today please delete it & switch to the new implementation.


 


Learn more:


Release Annotations documentation


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