Enable Azure Application Insights in Power Apps canvas apps

Power Platform already gives us some statistics related to canvas apps usage from the Power Apps home or Admin Center, which are really good, but those feature statistics related to the whole app, not to a specific screen, or related to user screen flow.

But luckily we can easily have that in place with Azure Application insights.

What is Azure Application insights?

Azure Application Insights is a powerful Application Performance Management tool, part of Azure Monitor, which can be used to monitor live applications and help to diagnose issues and improve app usability and can be integrated to several platforms.

How to use it? 

Before start using application insights, you need to create an Application Insights resource which will be related to your app.

After you have your resource created, navigate to it in the Azure Portal and copy the instrumentation key:

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Configuring the Power App to use Application Insights

Open your canvas app in Power Apps studio.

Select App in the top left side to see the App properties, and paste the instrumentation key in its box.

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Save it and it’s ready to be used.

Whenever users use your app, telemetry results are going to be now captured and you will be able to monitor app usage in a more advanced way.

Results

From the resource in Azure Portal, after enabling it and some users use the app, results are already available.

Among the several features available in Application insights, the one I’d like to highlight is User Flows, which can be found under usage:

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No extra configuration is needed to begin, and this feature can visualise how users are navigating across your app screens:

UserFlow

This can help you have statistics and identify patterns on your app usage, helping improve app usability and identifying possible issues.

It is also possible to use Application Insights to log custom trace events from your canvas apps if needed, so you can information that is more relevant to your apps needs using the Trace function, that can be used to send event or diagnostic information to your Application Insights resource.

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