From the course: Azure for DevOps: Continuous Feedback

Introduction to Visual Studio App Center - Azure Tutorial

From the course: Azure for DevOps: Continuous Feedback

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Introduction to Visual Studio App Center

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- [Instructor] The primary service that we are going to be using is going to be the Visual Studio App Center. So what is Visual Studio App Center? Visual Studio App Center brings together common services into a single DevOps cloud solution. It helps developers to build, test, and distribute their applications and once these apps have been deployed, developers can use it to monitor the status usage of their application using the analytics and the diagnostic services. In this chapter, consistent with the theme of the course, we are focused on the analytics and the diagnostics part because we are concentrating on continuous feedback. So which capabilities of Visual Studio App Center are we going to look at? We're going to be focused once again on monitoring the health of the client applications and as I said earlier, it could be any client application. App Center supports a wide variety of client applications, could be Android, Apache, could be iOS, could be macOS or it could be Windows applications, and that's the sample that I'm going to be using later on in this chapter. So how do you use Visual Studio App Center? Once again, similar to App Insights, you have something called the App Center Diagnostic SDK. You integrate this SDK into your client-side application, and there's a version of the SDK for the various platforms that we talked about in the above bullet. Once you've integrated the diagnostics into the SDK, you can then start collecting events. Maybe you want to track a custom activity within your application, maybe there's an unhandled exception that you want to log, or maybe there is a major failure that terminates the application. You want to know about these things that are happening within your application. And there are, of course, the usage analytics, how many people are using the application, which version of the application are they using, which region of the world are they using it from. All of that information can also be collected using Visual Studio App Center. So what we're going to do next is we're going to go into the App Center and create an application for ourselves, and then we will connect our client-side application to the App Center.

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