I am using Application Insights to view Telemetry for my application. As a demo I want to populate App Insights with data so I can generate detailed graphs and charts to show potential user scenarios. I want my data to span week even months, but I don't have time to wait that long.
Is it possible to manual place a timestamp/date into my Telemetry call in my app, like a few months in the past, so that I can have information from that time?
You can use ITelemetryInitializer to achieve that.
Method 1:
You can define a custom property which you can define the custom timestamp, instead of change the timestamp directly:
If use this method, in your custom class which implements ITelemetryInitializer, the code like below:
public class MyTelemetryInitializer : ITelemetryInitializer
{
public void Initialize(ITelemetry telemetry)
{
DateTimeOffset dateTimeOffset = new DateTimeOffset(new DateTime(2020, 1, 10));
//define a custom property, which is a date time
telemetry.Context.GlobalProperties["Custom_timestamp"] = dateTimeOffset.ToString();
}
}
After execute the code, you can see this property is added to each telemetry data in azure portal:
When you build your query to generate graph, you can take use of this custom property(Note: this property is string type, so you may use the built-in function todatetime() to convert it to datetime type) instead of using timestamp.
Method 2:
This method tries to directly changes the timestamp. I can see the timestamp is changed locally, it does not send to application insights. So currently, I suggest you should use method 1.
The code like below:
public class MyTelemetryInitializer : ITelemetryInitializer
{
public void Initialize(ITelemetry telemetry)
{
//try to directly change the Timestamp, it changes successfully in local(in visual studio), but it does not send to application insights.
telemetry.Timestamp = new DateTimeOffset(new DateTime(2020, 1, 10));
}
}
