Adding Application Insights to your .Net Core project in Visual Studio Community for Mac

Short sad story:

• I wanted to add Application Insights to my last .Net Core project
• Tried to follow the Quickstart guide
• Couldn’t find the Add->Application Insights Telemetry menu item
• End of the story

This is why I’m writing this article.

I had to figure out how to do it myself and here’s what I learnt.

First of all you will need to manually add the ApplicationInsights dependecy to your project by editing the .csproj file.
Close your project, then open your project’s .csproj file with a text editor and locate the ItemGroup containing all the PackageReference items and add the following line:

<PackageReference Include=”Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.AspNetCore” Version=”2.2.0" />

Now open your project and check that the dependecy is showing up properly in your dependencies list.

Add the instrumentation key to your appsettings.json

...
    },
    "ApplicationInsights": {
        "InstrumentationKey": "aaaaaaaa-bbbb-cccc-dddd-eeeeeeeeeeee"
    }
}

Finally configure Application Insights as a service in ConfigureServices of your Startup.cs as follows

services.AddApplicationInsightsTelemetry(Configuration);

That’s all folks!

This story is also available on xabaras.it (in Italian)