What is the best-supported approach for tracking logged-in Usernames/Ids in App Insights telemetry?
A User with Username "JonTester1" said some Pages he visited 4 hours ago were really slow. How can I see everything JonTester1 did in App Insights to trouble shoot/know which pages he's referring to?
Seems like User Id in App Insights is some Azure-generated anonymized thing like u7gbh that Azure ties to its own idea of the same user (thru cookie?). It doesn't know about our app's usernames at all.
I've also seen a separate field in App Insights called Auth Id (or user_AuthenticatedId in some spots), which looks to sometimes have the actual username e.g. "JonTester1" filled in - but not always... And while I don't see any mention of this field in the docs, it seems promising. How is our app's code/config supposed to be setting that Auth Id to make sure every App Insights log/telemetry has it set?
Relevant MS docs:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/usage-send-user-context
This looks to just copy one library Telemetry object's User Id into another... no mention of our custom, helpful Username/Id anyway... and most in-the-wild examples I see don't actually look like this, including MS docs own examples in the 3rd link below; they instead hardcode get a new TelemetryClient()
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/website-monitoring No mention of consistently tracking a custom Username/Id
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/api-custom-events-metrics#authenticated-users Shows some different helpful pieces, but still no full example. E.g. it says with only the setAuth... JS function call (still no full example of working client-side JS that tracks User) on the page, you don't need any server-side code for it to track custom User Id across both client-side and server-side telemetry sent to Azure... yet then it also shows explicit code to new up a TelemetryClient() server-side to track User Id (in the Global.asax.cs or where?)... so you do need both?
Similar SO questions, but don't connect the dots/show a full solution:
Azure Insights telemetry not showing Auth ID on all transactions
Application Insights - Tracking user and session across schemas
How is Application insight tracking the User_Id?
Display user ID in the metrics of application Insight
I'm hoping this question and answers can get this more ironed out; hopefully do a better job of documentation than the relevant MS docs...
The first link in your question lists the answer. What it does show you is how to write a custom telemetry initializer. Such an initializer lets you add or overwrite properties that will be send along any telemetry that is being send to App Insights.
Once you add it to the configuration, either in code or the config file (see the docs mentioned earlier in the answer) it will do its work without you needing to create special instances of TelemetryClient. That is why this text of you does not make sense to me:
[…] and most in-the-wild examples I see don't actually look like this, including MS docs own examples in the 3rd link below; they instead hardcode get a new TelemetryClient()
You can either overwrite the value of UserId or overwrite AuthenticatedUserId in your initializer. You can modify the code given in the docs like this:
if (requestTelemetry != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(requestTelemetry.Context.User.Id) &&
(string.IsNullOrEmpty(telemetry.Context.User.Id) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(telemetry.Context.Session.Id)))
{
// Set the user id on the Application Insights telemetry item.
telemetry.Context.User.AuthenticatedUserId = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name;
}
You can then see the Auth Id and User Id by going to your AI resource -> Search and click an item. Make sure to press "Show All" first, otherwise the field is not displayed.
Auth Id in the screenshot below is set to the user id from the database in our example:
We access the server from azure functions as well so we set the user id server side as well since there is no client involved in such scenarios.
There is no harm in settting it in both places, javascript and server side via an initializer. That way you cover all scenario's.
You can also manually add user id to app insights by
appInsights.setAuthenticatedUserContext(userId);
See App Insights Authenticated users
Related
I'm brand new to wrangling the IG Graph (and to API's, in general) and hoping someone might be willing to lend a hand. A bit of context: I am building a SaaS on Bubble.io. I have my authentication set up and am in the process of developing my FB App. In short, I want to enable the following:
Auth'd users curate content on IG by #mentioning my app's account in a comment to a post.
Those comments are intercepted via web hook (currently running smoothly on Integromat).
They payload is then passed to an API Workflow on Bubble, which parses the comment ID
The workflow then retrieves details of the comment and associated post.
The comment is correlated with the appropriate app user based on the username of the comment's owner.
The final two steps is where I'm confused. Based on my reading of FB's documentation, it seems impossible to retrieve a username or user id for the owner of a mentioned comment, which clearly presents a problem for me. Is this the case or am I just missing something? It seems to me there should be a way of getting at this data.
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You can use the username field, as done followingly:
mentioned_comment.comment_id(COMMENT_ID){media,text,username}
In the Simperium documentation/help section there is the following text:
All the data that is created seems like it must be tied to a user - is
that correct? Is it possible to have data that isn't tied to a user -
say a database of locations or beers?
Yes, though this isn't very clear yet. You can create a public user
(i.e., a public namespace) with an access token you share with other
users of your app so anyone can read/write to that namespace.
It's possible to limit this to read-only access as well if you need to
authoritatively publish data from a backend service.
Is there an actual example with this?
The scenario I have is as follows
My app will have a calendar
The primary user can add and remove data from the calendar
They will want to invite other users to add and remove data, my thought is that they can give them a token, the user can use their email address and this token to sign in
Am I on the right track?
You're definitely on the right track, but a little too far ahead on that track. The scenario you described is a great fit for Simperium, but sharing and collaboration features aren't yet released.
The help text you quoted is for authoritatively pushing content, for example from a custom backend to all users of your app. An example of this would be a news stream that updates on all clients as new content is added.
This is quite different than sharing calendar data among a group of users who have different access permissions, which is actually a better use of Simperium's strengths. We have a solution for this that we've tested internally, but we're using what we've learned to build a better version of it that will be more scalable for production use.
There's no timeline for this yet, but you'll see it announced on your dashboard at simperium.com.
I have a Google Spreadsheet containing a script that I wrote. The script updates a per-person sheet named after the logged in user, or creates a new one if it's not there yet.
I shared it in "can edit" mode with other people, expecting the code accessing the user name to work as it did in my case, but apparently it doesn't.
Google Apps Script seems to contain three ways to get the name of the current user:
Session.getActiveUser()
Session.getEffectiveUser()
Session.getUser()
and all of them return the empty string when I'm not the user running the script.
(Btw I'm having a hard time to tell the difference between them...)
Considering that I'm sharing this spreadsheet in read/write mode, I would be a bit surprised if this was an intended security method... it's not like I don't know the emails of the people accessing the spreadsheet I've explicitly shared with them... Plus, Google is asking for permission anyway, couldn't it ask for permission to access the user name as well??
Is there a way around this?
Is there a way around this?
These methods only work if you're using a Google Apps account and you're on the same domain as the user. If not, then there's no way to get the user id. AFAIK Google removed this feature completely for regular accounts. You may try to argue with them opening an issue here.
I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.
As a part of the signup process for my online application, I'm thinking of tracking the source and/or search keywords used to get to my site. This would allow me to see what advertising is working and from where with a somewhat finer grain than Google Analytics would.
I assume I could set some kind of cookie with this information when people get to my site, but I'm not sure how I would go about getting it. Is it even possible?
I'm using Rails, but a language-independent solution (or even just pointers to where to find this information) would be appreciated!
Your best bet IMO would be to use javascript to look for a cookie named "origReferrer" or something like that and if that cookie doesn't exist you should create one (with an expiry of ~24hours) and fill it with the current referrer.
That way you'll have preserved the original referrer all the way from your users first visit and when your users have completed whatever steps you want them to have completed (ie, account creation) you can read back that cookie on the server and do whatever parsing/analyzing you want.
Andy Brice explains the technique in his blog post Cookie tracking for profit and pleasure.