Wish you all a Happy New Year! As we stepped into 2018, it’s time to look back and see the progress we have made as a team to make Serverless360 a more mature product in the market.
In this blog, I’ll run you through the key features and improvements we have made in Serverless360 in 2017.
1. Switch to Composite Applications Concept
One of the most important updates to Serverless360 was the introduction of the Composite Applications concept. We introduced the concept of Azure Composite Applications in Serverless360 where you can logically group together various resources or entities from Azure Subscriptions (same or multiple subscriptions) and namespaces that represent a Line of Business (LoB) application in your architecture. With Serverless360, you can manage and monitor the application group as a whole that contains these different Azure services.
For more details about Composite Applications and the work that’s gone behind to achieve this, please read these blog articles —
Serverless360 – The Shift to Composite Applications Concept
2. User Access Policy
We improved the security aspects of Serverless360 with the User Access Policy restrictions. You can now create two types of user access — Super User and Normal User and define fine-grained security restrictions for normal users for different sections of Serverless360.
3. Governance and Auditing
We added the capability of Governance and Auditing in Serverless360 and categorized the reports based on three different activities —
- Operations (all basic CRUD operations on the entities)
- Messaging (all messaging operations such as resubmit, delete, repair and resubmit, and so on)
- Activity (all activity related information such as activity initiated time, activity completed time, entity, activity status and so on) Note: In the latest release of Serverless360 this feature has been moved under Activites section.
4. Dead-letter activity configurations
Serverless360 allows users to configure activities for dead-letter message processing from the Activities screen. Users can perform different actions on the messages such as Resubmit, Resubmit and Delete, Delete the message. This activity runs in the background and can process hundreds of messages without any user intervention. For e.g., the user can configure an activity to delete all dead-lettered messages from the queue every night at 00:00 hrs. This avoids the need for the user to manually delete every dead-lettered message from the queue.
5. Schedule Activities to Queues and Topics
Serverless360 users can create activity configurations and schedule activities at specific time intervals. By configuring activities, users can test their queues to see if its properly receiving and processing the messages and avoid doing this manually. E.g., a user can schedule an activity every day at 10 AM in the morning to send 10 messages into the queue. Users can configure the schedule recurrence as well according to their requirements.
6. Repair the message before resubmission
With Serverless360, you can now edit the message body before resubmitting it back to the queue/topic.
7. API Monitoring
You can now set up monitoring of your API endpoints and get to know if the API is healthy. If there is a state mismatch, you will be notified with the error details so that you can immediately take action on the API. With the API Monitoring feature, you can monitor the endpoint based on —
- Status Code
- Keywords in the message body
- Response time
Alternatively, you can also configure the request to your endpoint by providing Authorization Credentials, Payload and/or Custom Header.
8. Logic Apps Management and Monitoring
In addition to the Service Bus, Relays and Event Hubs capabilities of Serverless360, we added the capability for users to manage and monitor their Azure Logic Apps from Serverless360. Say, the hybrid integration solution connects to Logic App to execute a workflow — in this case, the user need not switch to the Azure Portal just to manage and monitor the Azure Logic App. Users can perform these operations right within the Serverless360 portal. Users can also monitor the Logic App based on the state (Enabled/Disabled).
We also added the Data Monitoring capability for Azure Logic Apps that will help administrators to keep a watch on specific metrics for a defined time period. Data Monitoring is the concept of alerting based on historical data. Example: “If my total billable executions of Azure Logic Apps exceeds over 500 every 30 minutes, then send me an alert”. With Logic Apps Data Monitoring capability, Serverless360 covers about 30 different metrics as shown below —
9. Analytics for Service Bus entities
We added the analytics capability in Serverless360 for dead-lettered messages in queues. You can view the analytical data in the form of a pie chart, line graph, grid view. Currently, analytics is available only for dead-letter statistics of Queues. We will be enhancing the capability in future releases for other areas.
10. Notification Channels
We added quite a few numbers of notification channels in Serverless360. We completely moved the notification channel configuration activity to the Settings pane. We added new notification channels like Microsoft Teams, WebHook notification channel in addition to the existing Slack, ServiceNow, and PagerDuty channels.
We will be continuing to invest more in adding more interesting features in Serverless360. Stay tuned for updates in 2018!
