VENDORiQ: Microsoft Retiring Classic Application Insights in February 2024

Why It’s Important

Organisations who are not yet upgraded to workspace-based Application Insight will now have to make a move from the classic to the workspace-based service.  

Based on Microsoft documentation, workspace-based Application Insight comes with new enhanced capabilities:  

• Customer-managed key: Data at rest will be encrypted by encryption keys that you only have access to. 
• Private link support: Securely link Azure PaaS services to your virtual network by using private endpoints.  
• Commitment tier pricing: With this pricing model, you can commit to buying data ingestion for a workspace which can save you as much as 30 percent compared to the pay-as-you-go price.  
• Log Analytics streaming ingests data faster. 

Before migrating from a classic Application Insights instance to a workspace-based Application Insights instance, it’s important to know a few things. The migration process is usually simple, but there are some things to consider beforehand. 

• This is a one way trip, there is no look back. Once initiated, the process from Application Insight to Log Analytics cannot be reversed. 

• When you migrate to a workspace-based resource, no data is transferred from your classic resource’s storage to the new workspace-based storage. Your classic resource data persists and is subject to the retention settings on your classic Application Insights resource.

• The Instrumentation Key should remain the same post migration, so no impact/changes are required on the application. (Same ingestion point). 

• The classic resource stays in place as is not removed, which results in no gaps in data collected during migration.

• Log Analytics is charged based on ingested data, so prior to migration it would depend on if other resources were writing to it.

• Log Analytics allows the use of commitment tiers to reduce cost when data volumes are consistent/high.

With all the above benefits and considerations organisations can seamlessly migrate to new workspace-based insights. Always consider testing the environment in a non-production environment first to ensure migration goes smoothly. 

Who’s Impacted 

• CTO
• IT teams 
• DevOps teams
• AIOps teams

What’s Next? 

• Plan migration as early as possible as retirement is due in February 2024
• Analyse projects that have Application Insights monitoring capabilities
• Plan and strategise for migration to workspace-based insights 
• Test the no production environments and then move to production

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