Feature Usage
What it is
Feature usage is telemetry about how much and how often specific features or product areas of an application are used — tracking adoption, popularity, and drop-off of individual features so teams know what to keep, improve, or retire.
Why it exists
Not every feature ships to an audience. Feature usage exists to answer “do users actually use what we built?” It surfaces low-adoption or unused features, reveals which areas deserve investment, and validates whether a release achieved its intended outcome — closing the feedback loop.
Key ideas
- Tracked via custom events in Application Insights / telemetry (e.g. “button clicked”, “workflow completed”), or explicit feature-instrumentation flags.
- Pair with feature flags: ship a feature dark, measure usage, then roll it out fully or kill it based on adoption.
- Metrics of interest: active users per feature, usage frequency, conversion/drop-off within a feature.
- It is the product/adoption lens, complementary to user analytics (overall behavior).
Exam notes
- Feature usage is the “are features used?” signal that feeds decisions to keep / expose / retire functionality.
- Often tested together with feature flags as a way to release to a subset and measure adoption before full rollout.
- Instrument custom events in App Insights and query adoption with KQL into workbooks.
Related
application-insights · user-analytics · feature-flags · feedback-loop · continuous-feedback
📘 Source: Microsoft Learn — Feature Usage