Azure Application Insights to track time spent by user on webpage

Question

How can I use Azure Application Insights to track time spent by a user on webpage. In the javascript of the webpage, there is a chunk of code from application insights which we have to copy. I want to understand what

 r=["Event","Exception","Metric","PageView","Trace","Dependency"]

means...Are there more parameters we can add to track some other stuff. Like if I wanted to track how long a user was on a webpage, how would I track that?

Answer 1

This functionality is built into the JavaScript SDK.

By setting autoTrackPageVisitTime: true, the time a user spends on each page is tracked. On each new PageView, the duration the user spent on the previous page is sent as a custom metric named PageVisitTime. This custom metric is viewable in the Metrics Explorer as a "log-based metric".

You can find the documentation for it here.

You pass the autoTrackPageVisitTime preference in the configuration object when creating your application insights instance.

const appInsights = new ApplicationInsights({ config: {
  connectionString: 'YOUR_CONNECTION_STRING_GOES_HERE',
  autoTrackPageVisitTime: true,
  /* ...Other Configuration Options... */
} });

Answer 2

You have to use Custom Metrics

Do your metric calculation using SO thread & pass it on like below to Application Insights.

appInsights.trackMetric("userstaytime", 42.0);