Yutang Lin, Program Manager for Microsoft gave a wonderful talk at Microsoft Ignite on some new preview functionalities within Microsoft Azure App Service. Here’s an overview of what her short but meaningful session was all about.

 It’s no mistake that Skylines Academy Azure monitoring lectures and demos are among the most popular with our students. Monitoring in Azure is extremely important to help you prevent and/or understand why downtime is happening with your app. It is an applicable and necessary function for IT professionals looking to keep an eye on app health.

In Yutang’s talk and demonstration we learned about two monitoring Preview services in Azure:

1.       App Service Integration with Azure Monitor where you can send logs from Windows or Linux App Service to Storage Accounts, Event Hubs, or Log Analytics. The service gives you more visibility into web apps.

With the App Service integration with Azure monitor you can:

• Create a dashboard (attractive for ops teams)

• Enable automatic emails for alerting on exceptions (nice for developers)

• Integrate with third-party technologies and services

• Look at logs from the past 30 days

• And more!

The integration also comes with new log types which are inputted into Azure Monitor:

• AppServiceConsoleLogs – useful for debugging

• AppServiceHTTPLogs – regress logs

• AppServiceAppLogs – supporting multi-line logs

• AppServiceAuditLogs and AppServiceFileAuditLogs – through FTP or Kudu

• AppServiceEnvironmentPlatformLogs – for looking into ASE ops (isolated single tenancy)

Below is a table showing availability of the above logs on Windows and Linux:

2.       App Service Health Check which pings all instances every two minutes. If you don’t receive a request back, particular instances are removed and regress is routed to an instance that is working well. The app service health check will also eventually provide a replacement for any down instances for performance (not yet available).

App Service Health Check has the following benefits:

• Increases app availability

• Gives insight and checks all instances

• Avoids having non-healthy instances serving requests

Yutang walked the audience through a demo in which she was able to show a failed application and 404 error and how App Service Health Check identified points of failure:

Overall it was a great session with a lot of information. We’re looking forward to these services coming out of preview and for any upcoming additions and improvements.

This blog post is based on THR2153: Best practices and tips for operating and monitoring apps on Azure App Service, Yutang Lin, Microsoft

Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite to watch a recording of this session.

Note: all images came directly from Yutang’s presentation.