How to bring complex Application Insights to a Farmer deployment?

Question

I got interested in Farmer and decided to try it out in my project. I managed to replace most of the ARM template with Farmer.

However, there are Application Insights left, as I have quite a complicated setup there, including some alerts, scheduled query rules and so on. Whereas everything that Farmer currently supports for AI is just name, IP masking and sample percentage.

How can I plug in AI setup into the Farmer so that I don't reject Farmer just because of that part? My service looks like this:

let webApp = webApp {
    name appName
    service_plan_name servicePlanName
    sku WebApp.Sku.B1
    always_on
    ...
}

Answer 1

So webApp setup has a builder keyword for this, link_to_unmanaged_app_insights:

Instructs Farmer to link this webapp to an existing app insights instance that is externally managed, rather than creating a new one.

However there are no examples and only one test using it, so after some experimenting, this is what proved to work:

1. Keep having AI setup in ARM in the source code, e.g. arm-template-ai.json.
2. Note the AI resource Id.
3. Use the aforementioned keyword in the F# app setup:

let webApp = webApp {
    name appName
    service_plan_name servicePlanName
    sku WebApp.Sku.B1
    always_on
    link_to_unmanaged_app_insights (ResourceId.create appInsightsName)
}

4. In the release pipeline, first deploy AI from the AI ARM template in the source code.
5. Then deploy all other resources from the ARM template generated by Farmer.

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An example how it can look in Azure DevOps: