Oneliner to send event to Application Insights

Sometimes you need to send event to Application Insights from the command line and you cannot download the ApplicationInsights.dll and use powershell script like described here. You may need it for your startup task or deployment script. It’s a good thing Application Insights has an easy to use REST API. Here is a single line command line that runs powershell and pass the script as a parameter. I split it into multiple lines for readability, you will need to remove all newlines before running. Just replace an event name and add custom properties if needed:

powershell "$body = (New-Object PSObject 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty name 'Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Event' 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty time $([System.dateTime]::UtcNow.ToString('o')) 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty iKey "1aadbaf5-1497-ae49-8e89-cd0324aafe6b" 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty tags (New-Object PSObject 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty 'ai.cloud.roleInstance' $env:computername 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty 'ai.internal.sdkVersion' 'one-line-ps:1.0.0') 
    | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty data (New-Object PSObject 
        | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty baseType 'EventData' 
        | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty baseData (New-Object PSObject 
            | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty ver 2 
            | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty name 'Event from one line script' 
            | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty properties (New-Object PSObject 
                | Add-Member -PassThru NoteProperty propName 'propValue')))) 
    | ConvertTo-JSON -depth 5; 
    Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://dc.services.visualstudio.com/v2/track' -Method 'POST' -UseBasicParsing -body $body" 

Running it will return the status:

StatusCode        : 200
StatusDescription : OK
Content           : {"itemsReceived":1,"itemsAccepted":1,"errors":[]}
RawContent        : HTTP/1.1 200 OK
                    x-ms-session-id: 960F3184-51B6-4E74-B113-88ACD106B7F3
                    Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000
                    Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Name, Content-Type,...
Forms             :
Headers           : {[x-ms-session-id, 960F3184-51B6-4E74-B113-88ACD106B7F3], [Strict-Transport-Security,
                    max-age=31536000], [Access-Control-Allow-Headers, Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Name,
                    Content-Type, Accept], [Access-Control-Allow-Origin, *]...}
Images            : {}
InputFields       : {}
Links             : {}
ParsedHtml        :
RawContentLength  : 49

And event will look like this in Application Insights Analytics.

Note, sender’s IP address and location was added to the event. Also powershell will set the User-Agent like this User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT; Windows NT 10.0; en-US) WindowsPowerShell/5.1.15063.0 so Application Insights detected that event was sent from Windows 10 machine.

It is much easier to use Application Insights using one of numerous SDKs, but when you need it - you can send data directly.