Collect multiple log for different customer sharing same Instrumentation Key

Question

We’ve developed an application and we’re ready to release it to our customer. Our idea is to use Application Insights to monitor the application and read the log produced by the application. Since we’d like to avoid to configure and insert an instrumentation key for each instance of application to be delivered to each customer; from our analysis we’d like to deliver the application with the same Instrumentation Key and filter the data once collected to Azure Application Insights portal. We’ve introduce a custom parameter to differentiate the message for each application instance.

 

Our request is related to the fact that collect multiple log for different customer sharing same Instrumentation Key is a good practice; since the necessity to use a different instrumentation key for each customer and the need to set it during installation procedure is for us not affordable.

 

Answer 1

Using a single App Insights resource and differentiating based on a custom property is a valid solution, especially if setting separate key is not reasonable based on your current architecture.

The official best practice is to use a separate key for independent applications, but a single key for different components in the same process. This commonly comes into play when talking about dev, test, and production. From what you've said, it sounds like your scenario could fall under either category depending on how you look at it.

The only serious downside I can think of is if there is something about the instance settings you need to customize for each customer. Things like billing, continuous export, and data retention policies are set on an instance of App Insights as a whole so you wouldn't be able to customize them without separate environments.