What would you configure in Application Insights for a production .NET API?

What Application Insights baseline would you add to a .NET API?

Covers useful request, dependency, exception, log, metric, and availability telemetry for a production .NET API.

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TL;DR

For a production .NET API I would start with requests, response codes, latency, exceptions, dependency calls, structured logs, and availability checks. I would make sure traces include enough context to connect an error to a route, operation, dependency, and deployment version. I would also add a few business metrics where they help answer whether users are actually affected.

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Application Insights basics, request telemetry, dependencies, exceptions, logs, custom metrics, availability checks, and production diagnosis.

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Why this question matters
Observability is useful only when it helps answer production questions. This drill matters because the production behavior is shaped by platform configuration, code boundaries, and the operational path the team will use during a real incident.
For a production .NET API I would start with requests, response codes, latency, exceptions, dependency calls, structured logs, and availability checks. I would make sure traces include enough context to connect an error to a route, operation, dependency, and deployment version. I would also add a few business metrics where they help answer whether users are actually affected.
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I would design the telemetry around incident questions: what changed, which users or endpoints are affected, which dependency is slow or failing, and whether mitigation worked. That means correlation across requests and dependencies, useful log scopes, dashboards for error rate and latency, and alerts on sustained symptoms rather than every noisy exception. I would also manage sampling and log levels so cost stays controlled without losing critical evidence.

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Collecting logs without request or dependency correlation.
Alerting on every exception regardless of rate or impact.
Logging secrets or full connection strings.
Adding custom metrics without a decision they support.

What would you configure in Application Insights for a production .NET API?

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