Understand and control costs

It's crucial to manage telemetry costs in finance and operations apps because sending data to Azure Application Insights incurs charges based on many factors. By implementing effective strategies, you can help control these expenses and maintain robust monitoring. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Application Insights team and the Azure Application Insights team provide the guidelines and resources in this article.

Understand telemetry costs

Azure Application Insights is an extension on top of Azure Monitor. Although many factors drive the cost of Azure Monitor, the main drivers are the ingestion and retention of data. Azure Application Insights provides the tools that you need to gain insights into the current usage. It also provides ways to automate the retrieval of usage cost information, and ways to set thresholds and alert when those thresholds are exceeded.

Learn more about all the cost factors in Azure Monitor cost and usage.

Strategies for controlling telemetry costs

Use the following strategies to control telemetry costs.

Selective telemetry collection

• Production environment focus – Configure Application Insights to collect only essential telemetry in production environments. This approach reduces data volume and associated costs.
• Custom telemetry management – Be careful when you add custom telemetry. Ensure that any other data you collect provides value that's significant enough to justify the cost.

Data retention policies

• Archiving practices – Regularly archive telemetry data that's more than 30 days old to more cost-effective storage solutions. This approach helps you manage storage costs and also lets you retain access to historical data.
• Retention configuration – Adjust data retention settings in Application Insights to align them with your organization's compliance and analysis requirements. This approach helps optimize storage expenses.

Sampling techniques

Sampling reduces telemetry traffic, data costs, and storage costs, while preserving a statistically correct analysis of application data. Use sampling when you measure scenarios where single entries might not be statistically relevant. For example, the average posting time that you track for an invoice remains relevant for only 70% of the invoices.

• Implementation of sampling – Use sampling to collect a representative subset of telemetry data. This approach reduces data ingestion volumes and costs without significantly compromising insights.
• Adaptive sampling – Use adaptive sampling features to automatically adjust the sampling rate based on traffic patterns. This approach ensures efficient data collection.

Learn more about sampling in Azure Application Insights in Sampling in Azure Application Insights.

Monitoring and alerts

• Cost monitoring – Use Microsoft Cost Management tools to monitor Application Insights usage and set up alerts for unusual spending patterns.
• Daily caps – To prevent unexpected cost overruns, consider setting daily caps on data ingestion. Be careful, because data loss might occur if the cap is reached.

Best practices from the Azure Application Insights team

• Workspace-based resources – Use workspace-based Application Insights resources to take advantage of cost-saving features such as Basic Logs and commitment tiers.
• Data ingestion management – Configure data collection to avoid unnecessary ingestion. Regularly review and adjust the types and amounts of data that you collect to align with your monitoring needs.
• Retention and archiving configuration – Set appropriate retention periods for different data types. Use archiving for long-term storage to manage costs effectively.

Related information

• Well-Architected Framework perspective on Application Insights – This article provides best practices for Application Insights, based on the five pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
• Cost optimization in Azure Monitor – This article offers recommendations for configuring data collection and retention to optimize costs in Azure Monitor. Those recommendations are applicable to Application Insights.
• Monitoring and telemetry using Application Insights – This article explains how to set up and use Application Insights for monitoring in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

By implementing the strategies described in this article and adhering to best practices, you can effectively control telemetry costs in Finance and Supply Chain Management and maintain comprehensive monitoring capabilities.