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Application Insights and behavior analytics

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Azure Application Insights allows us to understand better how does our application behaves and what is our users behavior. 
Many times you want to know what are the pages that attract users the most, what is the user flow inside your application and that is the retention level. All of this can be gathered using Application Insights that has some key features that enable this.

(1) Session, Events and Users 
Once you activate Application Insights in your application you have a dedicated dashboard where you can have a strong overview related to users (e.g. no. of users), sessions (e.g. pages visited during a session) and events (e.g. how often a certain page was visited). 

(2) Funnels
Used when you have flows and users need to navigate between different sections to be able to accomplish a task (e.g. product ordering). You can define a custom funnel and analyze the users patterns (e.g. how long it took to do a specific step, no. of users).

(3) Cohorts
Are used when multiple events, sessions, or users have something in common. They are grouped together under the same cohorts, enabling us to get more insights related to them. They are build using custom analytics queries, providing us more flexibility from the way how we build and use a cohort. 

(4) Impact
The conversion rate of users can be affected by multiple factors (e.g. load time). These views are created using multiple dimensions like user country, browser, load time to generate reports related to what is the impact on their behavior. 

(5) Retention
Especially for web applications the retention level of users is important. These tool allows us to specify from code events that could help us to identify what does affect the user retention. For example, displaying specific content or adds in different ways or winning a virtual gift (e.g. 5% discount for your next order)

(6) User Flows
Creates a virtual map of how does users navigate inside the application, covering the full lifecycle of the session. You can identify what are the most common flows and users find the content that they are looking for. 

(7) Usage analytics
It is the main entry point when you want to execute queries that combined all other metrics (e.g. counters, sessions, visited page). You have the full ability to write your own custom query that combines all the metrics that are stored by Application Insights, including custom events.

As we can see, Application Insights is not a tool used only to collect metrics, events, and user behavior. Can be used with success to visualize data and understand the behaviors. Even if it has strong integration with PowerBI, from 14 projects where I'm using Application Insights for web solutions, in only 1 case we need to use PowerBI for data visualization. 
The top 3 features of Azure Application Insights that shall be used more are Funnels, Cohorts and User Flows. If you did not have the opportunity until now to play with them you should give them a try!

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