Visual Studio App Center and Application Insights

Visual Studio App Center and Application Insights (the latter is part of Azure Monitor) are Microsoft-hosted services that monitor, analyze, and track deployed applications for development and maintenance purposes. App Center can also be used to build, test, and distribute applications to user groups for prerelease testing. The two services target different application types, although they have overlapping functionality.

Visual Studio App Center

App Center offers application build, testing, distribution, and monitoring services. It serves several types of client applications, including the following:

• Android applications, implemented using Java, React Native, Xamarin, or Kotlin
• iOS and iPadOS applications, implemented using Objective-C, Swift, React Native, or Xamarin
• Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications
• macOS applications.

(For an illustration, see “Visual Studio App Center Portal.”)

Build. App Center can retrieve source code from GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Bitbucket repositories. Builds can be triggered manually or set to occur on every source code check-in for continuous integration. Custom scripts can be provided to perform tasks before or after a build, such as inserting metadata or moving build output files. App Center can sign builds to enable them to run on devices.