Overview
Real user monitoring SDK that collects browser-side telemetry including page load times, session data, and unhandled exceptions from visitor browsers. Often deployed by engineering teams without governance review because it is classified as an operations tool, yet the client-side component collects data that constitutes personal data under GDPR. Organisations should ensure the SDK is included in their consent management configuration alongside traditional analytics tags.
Detection capabilities
- Signature count
- 3
- Detection methods
- network
- Property types
- hostnamepathname
Performance impact
Performance Impact
- Requests per page
- 3
Common mistakes
- 1Treating Application Insights purely as an infrastructure monitoring tool exempt from consent requirements, when the client-side JavaScript SDK collects user-facing telemetry including IP addresses, session identifiers, and page URLs
- 2Not configuring the SDK to disable or anonymise user IP collection, which is enabled by default and transmits full IP addresses to Azure
- 3Failing to configure the data retention period in the Azure portal - the default 90-day retention may exceed or fall short of organisational requirements
- 4Using the Application Insights SDK's automatic dependency tracking without reviewing what data is captured, including URLs of external service calls that may contain sensitive parameters
- 5Not selecting the appropriate Azure data centre region for telemetry storage, potentially sending EU user data to US data centres when EU regions are available
Related services
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