Managing Application Services - MSDN Documentation

Managing Your Application

This section provides a comprehensive guide on how to effectively manage your application services after creation and deployment. Proper management ensures optimal performance, security, and availability.

Core Management Tasks

Managing your application involves several key activities, including updating configurations, scaling resources, handling errors, and controlling access.

Updating Application Configuration

Configuration settings can be modified to adapt your application to changing requirements. This can include adjusting environment variables, connection strings, or feature flags.

To update configuration:

Navigate to your application's dashboard.
Select the "Configuration" tab.
Make the necessary changes and click "Save".

For programmatic configuration updates, refer to the App Services API documentation.


                # Example using CLI for updating environment variables
                az appservice app config appsettings set --name MyWebApp --resource-group MyResourceGroup --settings MY_SETTING="new_value"

Scaling Application Resources

As your user base grows or workload increases, you may need to scale your application. App Services supports both vertical (increasing instance size) and horizontal (increasing instance count) scaling.

Horizontal scaling is often more effective for handling increased traffic and provides better fault tolerance.

To scale your application:

From the application's dashboard, go to "Scale Out".
Choose between manual scaling (setting a fixed number of instances) or auto-scaling (defining rules based on metrics like CPU usage or request queue length).
Adjust the instance count or auto-scaling rules as needed.

Monitoring and Diagnostics

Continuous monitoring is crucial for identifying and resolving issues proactively. App Services provides integrated monitoring and diagnostic tools.

Metrics: Track key performance indicators such as CPU time, memory usage, network traffic, and HTTP status codes.
Logs: Access application logs, web server logs, and deployment logs for detailed insights.
Application Insights: For advanced performance monitoring, dependency tracking, and error reporting, integrate Application Insights.

Enable diagnostic logging to capture detailed information:


                # Example: Enabling detailed logging for a web app
                az appservice webconfig set --name MyWebApp --resource-group MyResourceGroup --detailed-error-messages true --failed-request-tracing true

Managing Application Deployments

You can manage different deployment slots to test new versions of your application before making them live. This minimizes downtime and risk during updates.

Create deployment slots (e.g., "Staging").
Deploy your new version to the staging slot.
Test thoroughly in the staging environment.
Swap the staging slot with the production slot to make the new version live.

Always perform rigorous testing in a staging environment before swapping to production.

Security Management

Regularly review and update security settings to protect your application and data.

Manage access control and role assignments.
Configure SSL certificates.
Review network security rules and firewall settings.
Keep application dependencies and frameworks up-to-date.