From Xamarin Insights to Visual Studio AppCenter

If you haven’t already heard about Visual Studio AppCenter then you should check out this blog post introducing it. Microsoft have had multiple devops technologies which all lived in separate silos. Along with its own Azure Insights it inherited Xamarin Insights and Test Cloud when it acquired Xamarin and also HockeyApp. There was obviously a lot of overlap and a mammoth task of building a unified solution.

In terms of crash reporting and analytics AppCenter owes much to HockeyApp, there’s even built in handling of viewing HockeyApp data from AppCenter. No such luck from Xamarin Insights and you’ll need to find your own time to migrate across before Xamarin Insights is retired on March 31st. I had an idea that as a stop-gap solution it would be useful to have the same API as Xamarin Insights but move to the AppCenter back-end. Thus was born InTheHand.AppCenter.Insights. This is now available on NuGet and the rest of this post will look into switching over to it and a bit of information about finding the data in the AppCenter website.

The library exposes the same API as the original Xamarin.Insights package but AppCenter doesn’t support 100% of the functionality so there are some gotchas when using it. You shouldn’t need to modify any of your code and when you are ready you can start calling the AppCenter API directly and eventually phase out the wrapper.

To start, open your existing solution and remove the Xamarin.Insights NuGet package from your projects. Next add the InTheHand.AppCenter.Insights package. It is a .NET Standard 1.0 library for maximum compatibility, it could have been higher for the supported platforms but it doesn’t need any APIs beyond 1.0. Rebuilding your app now and it should all build without any errors against the new library.

I’ve used the Obsolete attribute on methods/properties which are not supported, calling them will just be a no-op but you can remove these calls if you don’t want the warnings.

Now we’re not quite finished – your code still uses an API key for Xamarin Insights. You’ll need to create a new App on AppCenter for the required platform(s) and this will give you a new key (a Guid string) and you’ll need to replace the old Xamarin API key with this one where you call Insights.Initialize in each head project.

Once you’ve done this and rebuilt your app you’ll have working crash reporting and analytics going through to AppCenter and you haven’t had to re-write any code yet.

[Updated 8th March 2018] As of version 1.5 the Report method now supports logging exceptions to AppCenter as this functionality was recently added to AppCenter. You’ll see stack traces etc fully preserved in your App Center dashboard.

Remember I mentioned some gotchas earlier? Well there is one big gotcha – AppCenter doesn’t allow you to send handled exception reports – the Report method. So when the library processes these they are tracked analytics events with various properties of the Exception added. This means the presentation in AppCenter is not as good as the true crash reports. Unfortunately currently only the first 64 characters of the stack trace are preserved.

[Updated 28th February 2018] As of version 1.1 the library also supports Identify and will set these values using AppCenter’s SetCustomProperties feature. The unique ID you assign is given the name “Unique ID”.

AppCenter doesn’t natively support logging events with timing so the ITrackHandle implementation writes the total duration in seconds as part of the key/value data for the event.

A full crash entry looks like this in AppCenter:-

An event generated by a reported exception looks like this:-

The problem of course is that you don’t get reports logically grouped into exceptions thrown by the same code, instead you get a single “event” with the exception name and then properties which may indicate totally different stack traces. This is obviously not ideal but the danger of creating separate events using both the stack trace and exception is that there is a limit of 200 unique events. If you don’t manually delete ones you’ve finished working on as you might mark a crash as Closed you could hit this limit and lose data. I hope it is something that gets added to AppCenter soon, Microsoft promised this functionality would be in place before the Xamarin Insights shutdown but the deadline is fast approaching. When the API becomes available obviously I’ll update the wrapper as required. This is after all a temporary solution to help with the transition.

NuGet: InTheHand.AppCenter.Insights