Migrating AppCenter Analytics Events to Application Insights
05 Mar 2025 | AppCenter Azure dotnetWith AppCenter closing 31st of March, I bet some people are scrambling to find out what to do instead. In my organization we’ve moved crashes into Sentry. However, there is still the question of what to do about Analytics events, which Sentry does not have an offering for.
We had AppCenter analytics events being exported into Application Insights. To patch this functionality, one could add not too many lines of code to replicate more or less what AppCenter exported.
In your Mobile App, you can add the Microsoft.ApplicationInsights NuGet package and create a TelemetryClient like so:
var config = new TelemetryConfiguration
{
ConnectionString = MyConnectionString
};
telemetryClient = new TelemetryClient(config);
To set similar global properties on events which AppCenter did you add these properties:
telemetryClient.Context.Device.Id = your device id (you have to come up with something for this, I just save a GUID);
telemetryClient.Context.Device.OperatingSystem = GetOperatingSystem();
telemetryClient.Context.Device.Model = Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.Manufacturer;
telemetryClient.Context.Device.Type = Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.Model;
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties.Add("AppBuild", Microsoft.Maui.ApplicationModel.VersionTracking.CurrentBuild);
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties.Add("AppNamespace", Microsoft.Maui.ApplicationModel.AppInfo.PackageName);
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties.Add("OsName", Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.Platform.ToString());
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties.Add("OsVersion", Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.VersionString);
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties.Add("OsBuild", Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.Version.Build.ToString());
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties.Add("ScreenSize",
$"{Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceDisplay.MainDisplayInfo.Width}x{Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceDisplay.MainDisplayInfo.Height}");
static string GetOperatingSystem()
{
var os = Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.Platform.ToString();
var version = Microsoft.Maui.Devices.DeviceInfo.VersionString;
return $"{os} ({version})";
}
If you want to identify users you can do:
telemetryClient.Context.User.Id = userId;
telemetryClient.Context.GlobalProperties["UserId"] = userId;
Then to track events you can do:
public void TrackEvent(string eventName, IDictionary<string, string> properties = null)
{
if (properties != null)
{
// AppCenter exported event properties in a nested way
telemetryClient.TrackEvent(eventName,
new Dictionary<string, string> { { "Properties", ToPropertiesValue(properties) } });
}
else
{
telemetryClient.TrackEvent(eventName);
}
}
private static string ToPropertiesValue(IDictionary<string, string> dictionary) =>
"{" + string.Join(",", dictionary.Select(kv => $"\"{kv.Key}\":\"{kv.Value}\"")) + "}";
This will get you most of the way and any dashboards you’ve made based on the data in customDimensions.Properties can
be kept alive indefinitely or until you switch to something else.
