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Madhavan kovai
Madhavan kovai

Posted on • Originally published at serverless360.com

Enhanced monitoring for your Azure Logic App

Implementing a business process can be challenging because you typically need to make various services work together. Think about everything your company uses to store and process data. How do you integrate all these products? Azure Logic Apps gives you pre-built components to connect to hundreds of services. You use a graphical design tool to put the pieces together in any combination you need, and Logic Apps will run your process automatically in the cloud. Building a Logic App flow in Azure is simple, but enhanced monitoring for such a powerful resource is mandatory but lacks in Azure. In this blog, let us discuss the need to monitor the Logic App and how Serverless360 provides it.

Need for Logic App Monitoring

Logic Apps are a gift for integrating business scenarios as they are pretty easy to understand and integrate with other systems. As they play an integral part monitoring the Logic App is vital. Here are a few reasons why organizations should monitor Logic App,

  • Lack of Azure Logic Apps monitoring might affect the complete flow of the architecture, resulting in business risk.

  • Monitoring plays a vital role to avoid the storm of failed Logic App runs

  • Monitoring is an essential parameter to check while implementing any Azure resources.

Challenges in Azure

Though Azure has metric-based monitoring, it is difficult for an Operations/ Support/ Business user to understand the application’s performance without a holistic view. If we try to understand the performance at the application level, we must move into various subscriptions and drill deeper into the resource group to find each resource status manually. It consumes a lot of time and leads to overhead.

Azure portal is powerful to build enterprise-grade solutions but complex to manage and monitor; let us see the challenges in Azure,

  1. To identify the resubmitted runs.
  2. To focus only on the failed Logic App runs.
  3. To schedule, the automation of only the required failed logic app runs.
  4. To modify the input message which triggered the Logic App to run.
  5. To Monitor and identify the issues arising in Logic Apps.

It isn’t easy to perform the above tasks, and hence users might find it challenging when working with Logic Apps in the Azure portal. Serverless360 will be a unified solution to resolve all the prob
lems under one roof.

Manage and Monitor Azure Logic Apps with Serverless360

The native Azure Monitor helps its users be reactive, but any real-world business requires a proactive approach. To brief on this, let us consider a scenario where the queue acts as a messaging bridge, and the Function app validates the messages received from the queue. Since we are retrieving the messages in peek-lock mode, when the validation fails, messages get stagnated in the same queue. Beyond the TTL (Time To Live), the message gets pushed to the DDL(Dead-Lettered Queue). In our scenario, TTL is configured for 1min.

Now consider that the orders fail to pass the validation, and DDL messages are piled up in the queue. If we use the Azure monitor, we can get the alert only when the maximum threshold value is breached. But by the time we reach the alert, there will be lot more DDL messages piled up in our queue. It would be helpful for us if we had a proactive alert before reaching the threshold value.

Azure Logic Apps solve enormous business challenges with easy workflow design and automation but managing and monitoring the Azure Logic Apps in an application context is impossible with Azure Portal. To solve this challenge, the user must go ahead with Serverless360. Serverless360 is the solution for managing and monitoring Azure Serverless Applications. With the help of Serverless360, users can manage and monitor the Azure Logic Apps efficiently, resolving the challenges mentioned above. Let’s see how!

To identify the resubmitted runs.

Logic Apps run resubmission is possible in the Azure portal, but the challenge is unclear in identifying the resubmitted runs.

Serverless360 overcomes this challenge by adding a ‘Resubmission of’ tag to those runs resubmitted either from Serverless360 or from Azure Portal. Clicking it will fetch the details of the actual parent-run through which correlation between parent-run and child-run can be achieved.

To focus only on the failed Logic App runs.

In the Azure portal, users might find it challenging to understand which instances of the Logic App need you to take any action. It will also be tough to tell using which Logic App instances you have already resolved an issue.

This challenge can be easily solved by using the Action Required feature in Serverless360, which can group the runs that require user attention in the ‘Action Required’ tab. Operations like Resubmit can be performed on the runs available in this section.

To schedule the custom automation of failed Logic App runs.

Another big challenge the user faces is to automate the resubmission of only the required failed Logic App runs.

It can be solved by using Serverless360, where the failed runs can be customized to resubmit only required failed Logic App runs based on the filters.

Deeper Insights

Service Map in Serverless360 serves as a physical representation of the architecture, and the user can derive relationships between the entities that constitute the Business application. It provides a clean dashboard with a complete application view and displays the state of each entity based on its monitoring configuration.

Enhanced Monitoring for Logic Apps

Serverless360’s unique monitoring capabilities keep the end-user informed about the performance and status of their business application. It provides metrics monitoring with threshold values to benefit end-users. With the help of this monitoring, you can maintain a proactive business environment.

It is always necessary to stay up to date on the status of resources. However, it will be even more beneficial for any business to use an auto-correct option available in Serverless360’s Rules evaluation frequency. All resources associated with the selected Business Application will be monitored based on the frequency.

The Aggregation period in Serverless360 allows the user to configure a warning threshold value for the metrics of the Resources, which will send us an alert if the configured threshold value is exceeded. Based on the Aggregation Period specified, all metrics associated with the selected Business application will be aggregated using the metric’s Primary Aggregation Type.

Knowing the status of your Azure resources is critical for ensuring the smooth flow of business hosted on a cloud platform. A status report of resources associated with this Business application that has been chosen to be monitored will be sent during the specified hours. The report generated by Serverless360 will be a consolidated monitoring report in which the application level of visibility is achieved.

Recipient email configuration: Alerts are generally sent to mentioned Email addresses. Users can configure more than one email address and choose if the alerts can be sent to all the email addresses in a single go or as separate emails.

Notification channels: Besides Email alerts, third-party Notification Channels can also be configured to receive alerts from Serverless360. Notification Channels already configured in the Settings section can be chosen in the list shown.

Conclusion

Every business needs enhanced monitoring to avoid any downtime or failure. Especially for any business running in the cloud, there is an indispensable need for a tool like Serverless360. Utilizing it, monitoring the Business Application in Azure Cloud Space can be more effective. Serverless360 does not stop with monitoring but also provides better Management solutions for Operations and Support people to enhancing their day in and day out tasks.

Strengthen your Azure Logic Apps monitoring and get powerful toolsets, actionable insights to troubleshoot issues with the help of Serverless360.

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