We have a number of Lucee apps running within Azure that are monitored with FusionReactor, however, we are looking at cheaper alternatives. I figured it best to ask here before we head down the rabbit hole!
Just following up as I managed to get it working if anyone is reading this in the future.
It was just as simple as dropping the applicationinsights-agent-x.x.x.jar into the C:\lucee\lib directory.
Adding -javaagent:C:\lucee\lib\applicationinsights-agent-x.x.x.jar to the JVM arguments
Dropping in a applicationinsights.json file to the lib directory and restarting lucee.
The metrics take a while to come through but otherwise works a treat.
Thanks for sharing your experience Chris. FWIW, I’ll note that this is also like adding the agent for other APMs, like NewRelic’s Java agent, or Datadog’s, or AppDynamics, and so on. They’re all easy to add, via that javaagent jvm arg–just like FR is enabled, of course.
It will be interesting to hear how it goes for you, as my experience with most such Java apms is that they lack FR’s finesse for connecting dots to cf and lucee as cfml engines. They’ll often present things at a pure Java level, leaving us to connect it back to our requests and our cfml.
Certainly any monitoring is better than none, and I understand how FR’s pricing can add up with multiple servers or containers (and still more with the FR Cloud feature now being separately priced from the traditional FR agent–which is still required). Then again FR Cloud has still more things that other apms don’t yet offer, especially in its OpsPilot ai feature which is far more powerful than many who know of it even realize.
Anyway, I don’t mean this to be a sales pitch for FR. I don’t resell it or have any financial interest in it. I’ve just helped people benefit from it for many years. I’ve also long helped them assess other alternatives.
In fact just yesterday I was helping some struggling with making use of New Relic’s Java apm. I helped them find aspects of diagnostics in FR (which was also implemented in the same instance) that were far more helpful than NR was reflecting.
But again, I do sincerely look forward to hearing your experiences with Azure App Insights. I’d not yet used it or helped anyone else use it. It will also be interesting how its costs end up working out for you over time. It all may be great, which we’ll appreciate hearing about.