Wrong geolocation in application insights

Vishal Goyal 81

We have integrated Azure Application insights with our bot built using Azure bot framework using node.JS and typescript. Everything looks fine and we can see telemetry data flowing in.

The city and country names are shown wrong for users. Please see attached.

We have no users outside India. We are using bot telemetry SDK in our codebase.

When i used the below URL, it shows my city name correctly, but same is not being captured in application insights.

https://www.maxmind.com/en/locate-my-ip-address

bharathn-msft 5,101 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-04-24T02:59:46.4+00:00

@Vishal Goyal Thank you for reaching out with your query.

In case, if you haven't already reviewed the document explaining how geolocation lookup and IP address handling is done in Application Insights along with how to modify the default behavior, please check here.

Checking in to see for your current scenario are you running with default behavior of not collect IP addresses or any overriding done ?

Looking forward to hear from you to better understand your scenario, so that we can assist you accordingly.
Vishal Goyal 81 Reputation points

2021-04-26T11:06:09.727+00:00

Thanks @bharathn-msft for response. We had started looking at these 2 articles since last week and making relevant code changes to see if this helps.

Wanted to know if someone has faced these issues, followed these documents and did it help fix the same ?
bharathn-msft 5,101 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-05-05T22:46:00.777+00:00

@Vishal Goyal My sincere apologies for delay in getting back to this thread. Following through the docs you would be able to override the default behavior and see the actual IP. However after further discussing with our team regarding the scenario you are getting into , it was called out that they did hear some feedback from couple of customers on this intermittent issue and they are already working with our 3rd party GeoLite2 from MaxMind to further evaluate and fix this issue, because they own the database . However currently we cannot offer an ETA at this time.

Apologies again for your experience and once we have additional information from our team , will keep this thread updated.
Vishal Goyal 81 Reputation points

2021-05-06T05:02:38.977+00:00

Thanks @bharathn-msft for sharing further updates. Will wait to hear back.
Vishal Goyal 81 Reputation points

2021-05-06T05:22:02.957+00:00

After we made changes and tested, it shows the geo location all the more wrong. Cities like Tokyo and Ashburn come up and we know for sure no one uses it from these locations.
bharathn-msft 5,101 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-05-06T18:22:20.92+00:00

Thank you @Vishal Goyal for sharing additional details you are seeing. Are you already trying to unmask the IP ? so that instead of 0.0.0.0 you will get the actual IP address. That would really help for you to validate with any other Geo-lookup DB to get the actual location rather than the wrong one. As called out earlier , currently we have dependency on GeoLite2 from MaxMind , since the DB is owned by them to fix this and our team will continue to work with them and see how we can resolve the issue. Apologies again for your experience, will continue to share updates as we hear more from our internal teams and our 3rd party team.
Vishal Goyal 81 Reputation points

2021-05-07T06:37:48.473+00:00

@bharathn-msft . Thanks for response.

We did try to unmask the IP as per document. Attached is the code. But it does not save the unmasked IP in the client ip field. The same is stored in custom property. Is there something wrong with what we are doing ?

94664-clientip.txt
Vishal Goyal 81 Reputation points

2021-05-07T07:16:19.54+00:00

@bharathn-msft : DisableIPMasking property was not set to true. We have done the same and now client ip is shown as actual IP. But again it shows wrong IP.
bharathn-msft 5,101 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-06-15T18:36:54.737+00:00

@Vishal Goyal - My sincere apologies for delay in getting back to this thread. Post further evaluating this with our internal team , it has been called out that one of the workaround we can think of is for customers to enable ingestion of raw IP addresses into Application Insights and do their own geo lookup after the data is ingested.

However, please be aware that our team is working on procuring an updated version of the IP mapping database. We do not have an ETA at this moment, will offer guidance on that soon.

Please feel free to circle back if you have any additional queries. Sorry again for this experience , certainly our team is working to fix the issue. Thank you.
Vishal Goyal 81 Reputation points

2021-06-16T04:40:24.513+00:00

Thanks @bharathn-msft for updates. Appreciated.

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bharathn-msft 5,101 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-06-17T20:04:55.227+00:00

<<Resurfacing some of the information from comments to here for broader community usage>>

@Vishal Goyal - Sorry for the experience , it is a known issue which our team is aware. Currently we have dependency on GeoLite2 from MaxMind , since the DB is owned by them to fix this our team is working with them.

Post further evaluating this with our internal team , it has been called out that one of the workaround we can think of is for customers to enable ingestion of raw IP addresses into Application Insights and do their own geo lookup after the data is ingested.

However, please be aware that our team is working on procuring an updated version of the IP mapping database. We do not have an ETA at this moment, will offer guidance on that soon.

Please feel free to circle back if you have any additional queries. Thank you.
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Swami Polnati 0 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2024-12-11T00:00:07.4566667+00:00

Thank you @bharathn-msft for the updates. We have encountered similar issue with the incorrect geo location. This Application Insights returns false positive data for country, province and city for few clients only. This make the situation even tough with the reliability of the data. We are using this for a very important service and need help.

Is there any service/ end point that we can use for look up based on the LAT, LONG? Please share if there are any.

Thank you!
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Wrong geolocation in application insights

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