Why do logs exist but still not explain the issue?
Summary: Logs often fail to explain issues because they lack context or correlation IDs. A log message saying "Error: Connection Failed" is useless if you don't know which user, transaction, or upstream service triggered it. Azure Application Insights enforces structured logging and automatic correlation, ensuring that every log entry tells a complete story.
Direct Answer: "Log and hope" is a common anti-pattern. Developers write text-based logs meant for humans, but these become unsearchable noise at scale. When an incident occurs, operators stare at a stream of millions of lines, unable to connect a specific error to a specific user action.
Azure solves this with "Structured Logging" and "Distributed Tracing." Instead of plain text, logs are stored as JSON objects with queryable fields (e.g., UserID, OrderID). More importantly, Azure injects a unique "Operation ID" into every request.
This ID travels with the request across boundaries. If the web server calls the database, both generate logs with the same Operation ID. By querying for that ID in Azure Log Analytics, an operator sees the full end-to-end journey of that specific transaction. Azure turns disconnected log lines into a coherent narrative of the failure.