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Troubleshoot user behavior analytics tools in Azure Application Insights

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This article provides answers to common questions about the user behavior analytics tools in Application Insights. These tools include:

Counting users

The user behavior analytics tools show that my app has one user/session, but I know my app has many users/sessions. How can I fix these incorrect counts?

All telemetry events in Application Insights have an anonymous user ID and a session ID as two of their standard properties. By default, all of the usage analytics tools count the users and sessions based on these IDs. If these properties aren't being populated with unique IDs for each user and session of your app, you'll see an incorrect count of users and sessions in the usage analytics tools.

If you're monitoring a web app, the easiest solution is to add the Application Insights JavaScript SDK to your app. Make sure the script snippet is loaded on each page you want to monitor. The JavaScript SDK automatically generates anonymous user and session IDs, then populates telemetry events with these IDs as they're sent from your app.

If you're monitoring a web service (no user interface), create a telemetry initializer that populates the anonymous user ID and session ID properties according to your service's notions of unique users and sessions.

If your app is sending authenticated user IDs, you can count based on authenticated user IDs in the users tool. In the Show dropdown, choose Authenticated users.

The user behavior analytics tools don't currently support counting users or sessions based on properties other than anonymous user ID, authenticated user ID, or session ID.

Naming events

My app has thousands of different page view and custom event names. It's hard to distinguish between them, and the user behavior analytics tools often become unresponsive. How can I fix these naming issues?

Page view and custom event names are used throughout the user behavior analytics tools. Naming events well is critical to getting value from these tools. The goal is a balance between having too few, overly generic names (for example, "Button clicked") and having too many, overly specific names (for example, "Edit button clicked on 'http://www.contoso.com/index'").

To make any changes to the page view and custom event names your app is sending, change your app's source code and redeploy. All telemetry data in Application Insights is stored for 90 days and can't be deleted, so changes you make to event names will take 90 days to fully manifest. For the 90 days after making name changes, both the old and new event names will show up in your telemetry. Be sure to adjust queries and communicate within your teams accordingly.

If your app is sending too many page view names, check to see whether these page view names are specified manually in code, or if they're being sent automatically by the Application Insights JavaScript SDK:

  • If the page view names are manually specified in code using the trackPageView API, change the name to be less specific. Avoid common mistakes like putting the URL in the name of the page view. Instead, specify the URL as a parameter in the trackPageView API. Move other details from the page view name into custom properties.

  • If the Application Insights JavaScript SDK is automatically sending page view names, you can either change your pages' titles, or switch to manually sending page view names. The SDK sends the title of each page as the page view name, by default. You could change your titles to be more general, but be mindful of SEO and other impacts this change could have. Manually specifying page view names with the trackPageView API overrides the automatically collected names—that means you can send more general names in telemetry without changing page titles.

If your app is sending too many custom event names, change the name in the code to be less specific. Again, avoid putting URLs and other per-page or dynamic information directly in the custom event names. Instead, move these details into custom properties of the custom event with the trackEvent API. For example, instead of appInsights.trackEvent("Edit button clicked on http://www.contoso.com/index"), we suggest something like appInsights.trackEvent("Edit button clicked", { "Source URL": "http://www.contoso.com/index" }).

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