In a microservice architecture like the containerized Sitecore XP1 topology, the ability to track the progression of a single request through different services is very important to investigate problems, optimize our application code and build more reliable services. This method, called distributed tracing, helps to clearly show the dependencies and relationships among various services and components of a system. In complex distributed systems, where each service generates its own logs, it is also important to be able to correlate application logs to specific web request traces. This method, called contextual logging, automates the association of logs to traces and spans and adds new logging properties (like error messages or error classes) in the group of tracing dimensions, that can be used in querying and troubleshooting processes when trying to identify a specific pattern or clue.

In the Azure cloud world, these two methods can be implemented instrumenting the Sitecore services with Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor that provides extensible application performance management and monitoring capabilities.

In this blog post, I will describe how to procure Application Insights in an existing AKS cluster and the steps needed to instrument all services of a containerized Sitecore 10.2 XP1 solution to collect distributed traces and correlated Sitecore logs, targeting the latest Application Insights SDK version (2.20).

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