1. Cost: Azure Application Insights offers a free tier with limited data retention and comes with additional paid options for higher data retention and advanced features. On the other hand, SPM has a transparent pricing model based on the number of hosts monitored and the desired data retention period. It allows users to choose the most cost-effective option based on their specific requirements.
2. Data Collection: Azure Application Insights automatically collects telemetry data from various sources such as web applications, web services, and Azure resources. It provides built-in instrumentation for different programming languages, frameworks, and platforms. In contrast, SPM focuses on collecting logs and metrics from applications and infrastructure components, including servers, containers, and cloud platforms. It supports different log formats and protocols for data collection.
3. Analytics Capabilities: Azure Application Insights provides powerful analytics capabilities to query, visualize, and analyze the collected telemetry data. It offers a query language, known as Application Insights Analytics, that allows users to write complex queries and create custom reports and dashboards. On the other hand, SPM provides basic analytics features such as log search, filtering, and aggregation. It also integrates with external analytics tools like Elasticsearch and Kibana for more advanced analytics capabilities.
4. Integration with Monitoring Solutions: Azure Application Insights is tightly integrated with the Azure monitoring ecosystem, allowing users to leverage other Azure services for monitoring and managing their applications. It integrates with Azure Monitor, Azure Alerts, and Azure DevOps for seamless monitoring workflows. In contrast, SPM offers integrations with popular monitoring solutions like Elasticsearch, Datadog, and Grafana. It provides out-of-the-box dashboards and alerts for easy integration with existing monitoring workflows.
5. Customization and Extensibility: Azure Application Insights provides a wide range of customization and extensibility options. It allows users to create custom telemetry sources, extend the default instrumentation, and integrate with third-party tools and services. SPM also offers customization options but focuses more on log parsing and enrichment. It provides built-in log parsing rules and supports custom parsers and filters for data transformation.
6. Alerting and Notification: Azure Application Insights includes built-in alerting and notification capabilities. It allows users to define custom alert rules based on different metrics and conditions and sends notifications via various channels such as email and SMS. SPM also provides alerting features but requires integration with external systems like Elasticsearch and Grafana. It supports alert rules based on log patterns, thresholds, and anomaly detection.

In Summary, Azure Application Insights and SPM differ in terms of cost, data collection, analytics capabilities, integration with monitoring solutions, customization and extensibility, and alerting and notification.