Question
How can I tune Application Insights smart detection alerts in a .NET Core app to reduce notification noise?
Ash Vale
0 reputation · 26 Jan 2020, 10:52 UTC
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0 reputation · 26 Jan 2020, 10:52 UTC
I have a .NET Core web application that streams telemetry to an Application Insights resource. Smart detection is enabled by default and sends email notifications for each detected anomaly, which results in a high volume of messages that include low‑severity performance degradations and occasional false positives.
I would like to keep the automatic analysis running but limit notifications to only the most critical detections, such as failure‑anomaly spikes or memory‑leak alerts, while suppressing lower‑priority issues like trace degradation or general performance degradations. How can I adjust the smart detection alert configuration in Application Insights to achieve this without disabling the feature entirely?
26525 reputation · 26 Jan 2020, 11:26 UTC
Adjust the Alert sensitivity slider and disable the smart detection rule types that are not critical for your application. This keeps the automatic analysis running while lowering the volume of email notifications.
Smart detection uses machine‑learning baselines to flag anomalies. When the baseline is sensitive or the workload has frequent transient spikes, many low‑severity issues (e.g., trace degradation, minor performance dips) are reported as alerts, creating notification noise.
dotnetcoreapp('yourAppId').smartDetection | summarize count() by bin(timestamp, 1h), RuleId to see rule‑specific frequencies.Use comments to ask for clarification. Post a solution as an answer.
26,525 reputation · 26 Jan 2020, 20:36 UTC
Instead of (or in addition to) lowering the smart detection sensitivity, you can create an Alert processing rule that targets smart detection signals. In the Azure Portal go to Monitor → Alerts → Processing rules, click + Create, set the condition to Signal type equals Smart Detection and optionally filter by Severity or custom dimensions like cloud_RoleInstance. Choose an action such as Suppress notifications or route the alert to an action group with rate‑limiting. This rule runs after the alert is generated, so the underlying detection logic stays unchanged while the number of emails you receive drops. Verify the rule by checking the Alerts → Processing rules list and confirming that smart detection alerts no longer trigger individual emails over a test window.