Structured Logging with Azure Application Insights

It is completely possible to build your own logging system, and even quite straightforward to build a simple one. All you need is a service that can accept high volumes of data and a time series database. The trouble is that it's simple to create the basics, but maintaining an incredibly high uptime, adding sophisticated features, and making the system user friendly is very challenging. As always in a serverless architecture, it's better to rent one that someone else has built for you.

There is a plethora of logging services in existence, including DataDog and Humio. All have their particular feature sets, but as usual with a serverless architecture, we are only interested in paying for what we use and having unlimited scale. Hence, we will focus on Application Insights, which is built into Azure, has a built-in connection to Azure Functions and many other Azure services, and is charged per quantity of data ingestion. It's also got great...