Summary
Tracking user activity in cloud applications is essential for organizations to understand how their features are being adopted and utilized. By analyzing active usage trends, businesses can pinpoint which features resonate most with their user base, allowing them to prioritize development efforts on the tools and services that add the most value. This insight not only improves resource allocation but also ensures user satisfaction, as users are more likely to remain engaged with applications that evolve in alignment with their needs.
Moreover, monitoring the specific areas of an application that see the highest traffic provides critical information for ongoing optimization. It allows teams to identify pain points, streamline workflows, and enhance user experiences in the sections of the app that matter most. Coupled with data on active daily, weekly, and monthly users, this approach paints a dynamic picture of application health and usage patterns, guiding strategic decisions to foster growth and long-term success.
This article will cover Azure Workbooks within Azure Application Insights. It assumes you have enabled the out of the box telemetry provided for Dynamics 365 applications outlined here. Specifically, we will cover the following topics:
- Active daily, weekly and monthly users
- Usage trends over these timespans
- Understanding how to use the default filtering for Azure Workbooks
- Modifying filters and visualizations for Azure Workbooks
Workbook: Active Users
The workbook titled ‘Active Users’ is a great way to begin exploring workbooks in general. It provides three default filters and two charts visualizing how many users are using your application.
To locate the ‘Active Users’ workbook, or any workbook in Azure Application Insights, navigate to the Monitoring section of the left pane. Expanding the Monitoring section, look for Workbooks.
Default Filters
Filtering active users by monthly active users, page views, and custom Kusto queries provides actionable insights to optimize application performance and user engagement strategies.
Monthly active users allow for tracking broader trends in user retention and growth over time, giving a snapshot of the app’s appeal and usage frequency.
Page view filtering enables you to identify the most visited sections of your application, helping to prioritize updates or enhancements where they will have the most impact.
NOTE: Out of the box, the filters do not filter by Dynamics 365 or Power Apps application. To add a filter, review the Workbook parameters document. Additionally, I am providing a modified version including a filter for Dynamics 365 applications and Power Apps.
Metric: DAU, WAU and MAU
This metric allows you to easily switch between usage for the day, the week or the entire month. The default is Monthly Active Usage or MAU. The filter works off the timestamp field for the table being investigated, traditionally page views for UI based applications such as Dynamics 365 or Power Apps.
NOTE: Each of these metrics modifies the underlying queries behind the graphs of the workbook. The query can be extracted and run in the Kusto explorer pane by clicking the Log Analytics icon in the upper right-hand corner of the graph(s).
Active User Details
In the image below, activities are grouped by name showing active users, unique sessions and total instances. The active users column will help show the most used areas of the platform. Unique sessions give a better understanding of how users interact with the platform. A single user may log in and log out multiple times a day creating a unique session each time. They may keep the application open persisting the session. Comparing this number to the active users gives a better look at how users work in the platform.
Finally, the total instances gives us all of the page views or events collected for a specific activity. Comparing this to sessions per user can help discover heavily or rarely used areas of the platform.
Trend of Active Users
The Trend of Active Users visual can show throughout the chosen timespan, how events (Page Views, clicks, etc) changed over that time. Generally, as shown below, you would see a consistent chart. If anomalies do exist, clicking the Log Analytics button in the top right corner will allow you to further diagnoses what is happening.
Identifying Types of Users (e.g. Low Usage)
Understanding areas of the platform with low usage is critical for organizations to optimize their resources and enhance user satisfaction. Identifying features or areas of the platform that are underutilized, organizations can assess whether these areas are redundant, require better visibility, or need improvements to meet user needs.
For instance, if a dashboard within Dynamics 365 shows consistently low engagement, it may indicate that users find it unintuitive or prefer external solutions. Refining the dashboard or promoting its benefits could improve adoption rates, thereby maximizing the platform’s value and aligning it more closely with user expectations.
Out of the box telemetry provides user identifiers to help determine which sets of users are using certain areas of the platform. Comparing the list of page views against the list of active licensed users can provide insights into not only who is using the platform but what areas they are active in.
The query and information provided in the “Telemetry Events in Model Driven Apps” documentation provides additional information. To compare the data delivered to Azure Application Insights to Dataverse tables, leverage a reporting platform such as Power BI. Microsoft Power BI can connect to both Azure Application Insights and Dataverse to combine data into a single pane of glass.
Modifying the Workbook
Here is a link from Microsoft describing how to edit workbooks. This is helpful when you may need to provide specific filters, e.g. which Power Apps or Dynamics 365 apps. Most likely you’ll need to understand the Kusto Query Language (KQL) to some extent. Multiple templates exist to help you learn more about Azure Workbooks.
To learn about the Kusto Query Language, Microsoft has a learning module that can help.
Default Workbook Location
Below are links to the default workbook locations. These are helpful if you need to revert or see the history of the Azure Workbooks.
Microsoft Tutorials
Below you’ll find a link to help you get started writing your own Kusto queries. This is a beginner level course and will help learn basics such as “project, take, where, count, etc”. This is specific to any service that uses Kusto including Azure Application Insights, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Monitor Queries, Azure Data Explorer, etc.
Write your first query with Kusto Query Language – Training | Microsoft Learn
The training below is specific to Azure Application Insights. It covers additional user features within the service. Microsoft Unified offers services to help guide you and your operational and platform teams through these features and how to utilize them to uncover deep user insights.
Understand your customers in Application Insights – Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn
Next Steps
This article describes user events delivered from Managed Environments to Azure Application Insights. We covered the ‘Active Users’ workbook in Azure Application Insights. We looked at the filters that can be applied, how to review the visualizations and provided a custom workbook with filters specific to Power Apps.
If you are interested in learning more about specialized guidance and training for monitoring or other areas of the Power Platform, which includes a monitoring workshop, please contact your Microsoft representative for further details.
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