Daniel Hindrikes

I Think it's really important to monitor apps. Of course the most important part is to log errors in the app. But I also like to track how my users uses my apps. For the lastest app I have built I have used a monitoring tool from Xamarin called Insights, http://xamarin.com/insights.

While I alwas have crossplatform and testability in mind when I buildning apps I first create a logger interface.

public interface ILogger
{
     Task InitializeAsync();

    //Log exceptions
     void LogException(Exception ex);

     //Log information about events, for example view navigation
     Task TrackAsync(string identifier, Dictionary details = null);
     
     //Log information about a user
     Task Identify(string userId, Dictionary details = null);
}

While Xamarin Insights is compatible with Portable Class Library I writing the implementation in a project that I can share between platforms.

public class InsightsLogger : ILogger
{
     public virtual Task InitializeAsync()
     {
     }

     public void LogException(Exception ex)
     {
           Insights.Report(ex, ReportSeverity.Error);
     }

     public Task TrackAsync(string identifier, Dictionary details = null)
     {
           Insights.Track(identifier, details);
     }

     public Task Identify(string userId, Dictionary details = null)
     {
          Insights.Identify(userId, details);
     }
}

The InitializeAsync method is virtual so it can be overridden, when using Xamarin Insights each platform has to have the Initialize code. Because of that I also need to create a logger class for each platform.

While I don't want errors from development together with production data I use to create two apps in Insights, one for development and one for production. I using conditional compile for to initialize with the right app key.

 public class WinPhoneInsightsLogger : Logging.InsightsLogger
    {
        public override async Task Initialize()
        {
#if DEBUG
            Insights.Initialize("key for debug use");
#else
            Insights.Initialize("key for production use");
#endif
        }
    }

if you want to read more about Xamarin Insights you can do it here, http://xamarin.com/insights