How Does App Insights Compare To Loupe

What is Microsoft App Insights?

Microsoft Azure App Insights is part of the Azure Monitor suite of observability solutions hosted in Azure. It’s designed to collect and analyze telemetry (primarily performance and availability information) for your applications.

What is Loupe?

Loupe is an application logging platform created by Gibraltar Software designed to provide a great logging experience coupled with powerful application error analysis to ensure a development team can focus on the right problems that are happening in the field - whether that’s just in your data center or around the world deployed to thousands of computers.

How does App Insights compare to Loupe?

Loupe and App Insights emphasize different aspects of the overall application performance monitoring (APM) space. App Insights is designed to work with large, high volume applications and is focused on the current state of an application (its health and performance) and summary information for comparison over time (like overall traffic summarized over the time interval stored in AI). App Insights excels at providing a macro-level understanding of the behavior of an application in production.

Loupe focuses on the opposite end of the APM space - starting with detailed log data describing each request and a complete transcript of what’s happened within your application it provides a micro-level trace of exactly what has happened in your application. Various Loupe views can create summaries of activity and performance like AI but the detailed log data is always at the heart of Loupe.

How Loupe Complements App Insights

The key advantage Loupe adds to other APM solutions like App Insights is its detailed log data and error management. Error managements starts with better error aggregation of errors (differentiating between one error 3,000 times or 3,000 unique errors) and continues through its built-in understanding of products, applications, releases, and environments. Loupe stores data by product & application facilitating analysis across versions or environments whereas most APM solutions store data by a specific deployed environment, making analysis between environment more difficult.

Specific benefits of Loupe include:

• Aggregation of errors by distinct signature into Events which can be tracked as Issues.
• Find a specific error that occurred and see the details leading up to that error.
• Filter / Ignore errors or events.
• Reopen issues if a previously fixed bug resurfaces in a later version.
• Local and remote log detailed viewing facilitating local development.
• Low cost for storing large volumes of detailed log data.

Optimizing Loupe and App Insights Together

When using Loupe and App Insights together, we recommend having exceptions and errors reported to both systems. This allows high-level cross-system operational understanding through App Insights and a developer-focused understanding through Loupe that includes more details of the events leading up to an error and understanding how the error rate changes across different environments and versions.