Monitoring Your App Services

Effective monitoring is crucial for ensuring the health, performance, and availability of your applications hosted on App Services.

Introduction to App Services Monitoring

App Services provides a comprehensive suite of tools and features to monitor your applications. This includes tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), analyzing logs, and setting up alerts for potential issues.

Key Monitoring Features

• Metrics: App Services collects a variety of metrics that offer insights into your application's performance, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, network traffic, and request counts.
• Logs: Access application logs, web server logs, and deployment logs to diagnose problems and understand application behavior.
• Application Insights: For deeper diagnostics and performance analysis, integrate Application Insights to gain insights into request failures, response times, dependency tracking, and live metrics.
• Alerts: Configure alerts based on specific metric thresholds or log events to be notified proactively when issues arise.
• Diagnose and Solve Problems: A built-in troubleshooting tool that analyzes your app's configuration and runtime to identify and suggest solutions for common problems.

Viewing Metrics

You can view metrics directly from the Azure portal:

1. Navigate to your App Service resource in the Azure portal.
2. In the left-hand menu, under the 'Monitoring' section, select 'Metrics'.
3. Choose the desired metric, aggregation type, and time range to analyze your application's performance over time.

Commonly Monitored Metrics:

• HTTP Server Errors: Tracks the number of HTTP requests that resulted in a server-side error (5xx).
• CPU Time: The total CPU time consumed by the App Service instance.
• Memory Working Set: The amount of physical memory currently used by the App Service.
• Requests: The total number of HTTP requests received by the App Service.
• Data In/Out: Network traffic flowing into and out of the App Service.

Working with Logs

App Services supports several types of logs:

• Application Logging: Logs generated by your application code. Enable this in the App Service settings to capture custom logs.
• Web Server Logging: Logs from the underlying web server (e.g., IIS).
• Detailed Error Messages: Provides more detailed information about HTTP errors.
• Failed Request Tracing: Captures detailed traces for failed HTTP requests.

Accessing Logs:

Logs can be accessed via:

• Log Stream: Real-time log viewing directly in the Azure portal.
• Kudu/Advanced Tools: Access log files stored on the App Service file system.
• Storage Account: Configure logs to be archived to an Azure Storage Account for long-term retention and analysis.

# Example of enabling Application Logging in Azure CLI
az webapp log config --name <your-app-name> --resource-group <your-resource-group> --application-logging on --level Information
            

Alerting

Set up alerts to notify you when certain conditions are met, allowing for rapid response to performance degradation or service outages.

1. Navigate to your App Service resource.
2. In the left-hand menu, under 'Monitoring', select 'Activity Log' and then 'Alerts'.
3. Click '+ Create alert rule'.
4. Define the scope, conditions (based on metrics or logs), and actions (e.g., email notification, webhook).

Diagnose and Solve Problems

This integrated tool can automatically detect common issues like high CPU usage, memory leaks, and deployment failures. It provides step-by-step guidance and recommendations for resolution.

1. Navigate to your App Service resource.
2. In the left-hand menu, under 'Monitoring', select 'Diagnose and solve problems'.
3. Review the suggested analyses or run custom diagnostics.

Common Diagnostic Categories:

• Availability and Performance
• Application Crashes
• HTTP 5xx Errors
• Deployment Issues