A mid-sized publishing company that provides books and digital resources for educators relied on its website as a vital platform for distributing content and supporting teachers. When the site began experiencing slow page responses and occasional full restarts, the disruptions frustrated educators trying to access resources and threatened the company's reputation and sales.
The performance issues were difficult to diagnose because they occurred sporadically during sudden peaks in request traffic. Standard Azure Application Insights monitoring helped track general activity, but its default settings masked critical details such as IP addresses and user-agent information. Without this context, the IT team could not determine whether the traffic spikes came from legitimate users, automated bots, or misconfigured integrations.
Visus enhanced the client's existing Application Insights implementation by developing custom telemetry initializers within their ASP.NET MVC application. This addition enabled the system to capture anonymized IP addresses and user-agent details alongside standard telemetry data. The enriched monitoring provided clear visibility into the types of traffic overwhelming the site—while maintaining compliance with data privacy standards.
With access to this new layer of data, the client quickly identified and addressed problematic request patterns. The improvements reduced timeouts and eliminated unnecessary site restarts, resulting in a faster, more reliable platform for educators. Teachers could once again access the resources they needed without interruption, reinforcing trust in the company's digital services.
This project demonstrated that monitoring tools are only as effective as the data they collect. For organizations that depend on digital platforms, extending out-of-the-box solutions to capture contextual information—such as anonymized IP and user-agent data—can significantly improve the ability to diagnose and resolve performance issues before they impact end users.