Microsoft Previews AI-Based Code Optimizations for .NET Apps -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Previews AI-Based Code Optimizations for .NET Apps

By Kurt Mackie
05/18/2023

Azure Monitor users can now try a public preview of Code Optimizations to detect performance issues with their .NET apps and services, per a Thursday Microsoft announcement.

Code Optimizations was formerly known as "Optimization Insights" back when it was introduced in March 2022 as a "limited preview" release. It's part of Application Insights, an Azure Monitor extension that carries out application performance monitoring tasks using telemetry data.

Code Optimizations taps the Applications Insights Profiler and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to find performance issues, such as CPU use and memory use troubles. It will analyze an application's runtime behavior and compare that performance with best practices, per Microsoft's document on Code Optimizations.

Those application performance best practices come from Microsoft, as Code Optimizations is based on collecting traces from "Microsoft-owned services around the globe," according to Microsoft's March 2022 description:

By learning from these traces, the model is able to glean patterns corresponding to various performance issues seen in .NET applications and learn from the expertise of performance engineers at Microsoft. This enables our AI model to pinpoint with accuracy a wide range of performance issues in your app.

Organizations can benefit from Code Optimizations by possibly not needing to scale out cloud resources and pay for "unnecessary compute power," Microsoft's announcement suggested. Code Optimizations also potentially can improve "user experience" issues with applications, and it can save IT pros the time of "manually sifting through gigabytes of profiler data."

Lastly, Microsoft suggested that the use of Code Optimizations won't drag down apps or even have a cost for organizations:

Code Optimizations runs at no additional cost to you and is completely offline to the app. It has no impact on your app's performance.

Application Insights in Azure Monitor is said to be free "for experimental use," as users get a "certain allowance of data each month free of charge," according to Microsoft's Azure Monitor FAQ document. More generally, Microsoft does charge for data ingested with Application Insights, per Microsoft's Azure Monitor pricing page.

In case one's recollection is a bit fuzzy, Microsoft did have separate Log Analytics and Application Insights products that seemed to do similar things as these Azure Monitor capabilities. However, both of those products got rolled into Azure Monitor more than four years ago, Microsoft's FAQ explained.

"Features in Log Analytics and Application Insights haven't changed, although some features have been rebranded to Azure Monitor to better reflect their new scope," the FAQ added.

Microsoft doesn't charge for Azure Monitor features that are automatically enabled. There's no charge for the "collection of metrics and activity logs" when used with Azure Monitor's enabled features, the FAQ explained. However, Microsoft does charge for other Azure Monitor capabilities, such as "log queries and alerting."

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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