In our previous webinar, “Azure Service bus, better managed and monitored using Serverless360” we discussed in detail on the capabilities of Serverless360 in managing and monitoring Azure Service bus with a Real-Time Cab Booking Scenario. This webinar will be focused on management and monitoring capabilities for Azure Logic Apps in Serverless360.
Key Takeaways
- Consolidated Monitoring from Serverless360 to Monitor Azure Logic Apps in Various perspectives
- Tracking business process and Transactions of Logic Apps using BAM in Serverless360
- Achieving Advanced Security in dealing with Azure Logic Apps
- Understanding Azure Logic App and Its applications
- Managing Azure Logic Apps with deep integrated tooling from Serverless360
What is an Azure Logic App?
Azure Logic App is a cloud service that helps you automate and orchestrate business process and workflows. It uses connectors to orchestrate the workflows which simplify designing and facilitates building scalable solutions.
Azure Logic Apps in Business?
The Azure Logic app is used to create the business orchestrations by consuming prebuilt APIs as Microsoft managed connectors. Let us consider a familiar real-time application, Cab booking system, ‘Fly Wheel Cabs’, for better understanding of Azure Logic Apps.
For every new booking submitted by a customer in the Fly Wheel Cabs application, a Service Bus message is pushed into the bookinghandler Queue. Service Bus Queue is selected here to meet the need to have a linear messaging model. Logic App, BookingProcessor listens to the Queue for any new message. Logic App will pick up any new booking message arriving in the bookinghandler Queue, at a defined frequency. With the help of an Azure function, ValidateBooking, the booking request is validated to contain valid mandatory information. Based on the verdict from the Function, the Logic App action pushes the message into Topic with label ‘booking confirmed’ or ‘booking rejected’. Service Bus Topic has been selected here to meet the published- subscriber model. The messages pushed into the Service Bus Topic should get auto-filtered to the respective Topic subscriptions, Valid and Invalid.
Challenges in the Azure portal
Use of logic app in the Fly Wheel Cab application reduced the complexity in providing an efficient business solution. Though it has powerful capabilities, there are some challenges in managing and monitoring them in the Azure portal. Here are some business challenges that Azure users face in managing and monitoring Azure Logic Apps in the Azure portal
- No Failure Detection
- No Consolidated Monitoring
- No Workflow Tracking
- No Auditing
Obviously, the solution to solve these challenges would be Serverless360, the one platform to manage and monitor the Azure Serverless Application
Solution from Serverless360
Trigger and Run history
In the FlyWheelCabs system, there is a requirement to achieve correlation on Logic Apps re-runs. In the Azure portal, it is not possible to find the parent-run of re-runs. Serverless360 identified this challenge and came up with a solution. With the correlation tag in Serverless360 run history, it is possible to identify the parent-run of a re-run. It is also possible to add an ignore tag with the reason to a run, to inform the team to ignore these runs from further investigation while debugging an issue. User can also check the run/trigger history of the correlated runs from Serverless360 itself.
As a developer or tester, there would be a need to run a Logic App trigger for testing purpose. Without switching to the portal, User can test his/her environment by triggering the Logic Apps from Serverless360 itself. It is also possible to Enable/Disable the Logic Apps and view the properties of them.
Monitoring
Azure provides the entity level monitoring on their metrics, but the actual need would be Consolidated monitoring at the application level.
For monitoring Azure Logic Apps in multiple perspectives, Serverless360 has four types of monitors: Status Monitor, Threshold monitor, Data monitor and Watch monitor.
Status Monitor
Choose Serverless360 status monitor to get application health reports at the specified time in a day representing the state of Logic Apps against the desired values of its state.
Threshold monitor
Monitor your Azure Logic Apps when their state violates desired values for a specified period, say few seconds/minutes. AutoCorrect their state to restore the business without any manual intervention.
Data monitor
When there is a need to monitor the performance, consumption, the right monitor to choose would be the data monitor. With the extensive set of metrics, it is possible to monitor the above needs and even more.
Watch monitor
When there is a need to get notified on logic apps failures, the user cannot rely on Azure Monitoring services and it not at all possible with the Azure portal. Serverless360 identified these concerns and came up with a solution called watch monitor. The watch monitor can detect the failure in Logic Apps runs within the frequency specified while configuring it.
Business Activity Monitoring
In most of the organizations, there is a need for a distributed tracing of the message flow through Logic Apps in the business orchestration. Serverless360 business activity monitoring (BAM) tracks the business processes or transactions in Logic Apps built in Azure portal. It is also possible to reprocess the business processes with exception and monitor them based on a search query against a threshold value.
User management
Though there is a Role Based Access Control system available in the Azure portal it is challenging to come up with an appropriate custom role with need only permissions on the entities in the business application. Custom roles in Serverless360 are simple and straight forward. Provide permissions at the application level. Define a granular user access policy defining actions the role can perform. For Logic Apps, it is possible to give or restrict access to manage the Logic Apps as well as manage BAM capabilities too.
Governance and Audit
When multiple users are authorized to access the Azure Logic Apps, it is necessary that their actions on the Azure applications are audited. Serverless360 tracks every user action on the Azure entities associated with it. It is also possible to export the reports to excel or pdf format.
Strengthen your Azure Logic Apps monitoring and get powerful toolsets, actionable insights to troubleshoot issues with the help of Serverless360.
Conclusion
In this webinar, we saw what Logic Apps is? how it can be better managed and monitored using Serverless360? Do check out the complete webinar recording below.
