Introduction
Over the last few years, Microsoft has built excellent tooling around different technologies. Today, everything is available and achievable through the Azure Portal, which is great and helps to manage complex solutions. However, this brings in its own challenges when it comes to managing the distributed resources. You may need to master more than one tool to monitor your application.
Serverless360 has several significant features that help all the Azure users to manage & monitor the Azure resources under one roof.
In this article, we have listed the most used features of Severless360 by our customers from fortune 500 and, also get to know how you can use these features for the benefit of your business.
Business Application
Problem:Most of the integration solutions built using Azure makes use of 5-6 different services like Azure Service Bus Queues, Topics, Logic Apps, Event Hubs, Relays, APIs, and so on. Managing this complex solution becomes a difficult task for the users because it is only possible to monitor the entities in the Azure portal and it doesn’t provide application-level visibility.
Solution: Serverless360 has a feature called Business Application to overcome all these above challenges. It provides easy access for the end-users to view their applications without getting lost in the complex Azure Portal.
Business Application has the following capabilities
- Logically group all your siloed entities that participate in your business solution into a Serverless Business Application.
- Entities can be grouped from different Azure Resource Groups, Azure Subscriptions, and Azure Regions.
- Business Application Dashboard offers a comprehensive view of the current state of all entities that participate in a business solution.
- Get immediate feedback on the status of entities based on the configured monitors.
Achieve Distributed Tracing with Business Activity Monitoring
Problem: How many times do the business ask your team the question on distributed tracing “Where is the message”? This could be an order, a product update, an event about some interesting change in a system and the business users are unsure where the transaction is up to or if there is a problem. This can be a heavy support burden on an IT department.
The delivery team will also work on a solution but most of the time the solution will be premature, since building an enterprise-grade tracking/monitoring solution requires enormous effort.
Solution: That’s the challenge that can be tackled in Serverless360 with the BAM feature. It provides a simplified business-focused view on what might be a complex underlying system or group of system interactions that execute to fulfill the business transaction. By using BAM, you can significantly simplify the ability to support these business transactions. You can make it easy for your support team to get to the issue quickly, you can recover from issues faster and you can even allow business users to participate in answering their own questions like “Where is my order”?
In Serverless360, we have developed Business Activity Monitoring as a Service module where we have handled the heavy lifting of a business process monitoring solution for cloud solutions. This allows you to focus on using the service and delivering value to the organization.
BAM solution covers the following 5 key areas
- Track
- Search
- Reprocess
- Monitor
- Analyze
Message Processing in Service Bus
Problem: One of the main challenges is dealing with Service Bus Queues/Topics in the Azure portal because there is no visibility of messages and the message processing capabilities of Service Bus Explorer is limited but the demands in real-time business would be more like to resubmit, repair and resubmit and purge along with governance and audit. In some scenarios, there would also be requirements to resubmit the dead lettered messages to the same or another Service Bus Queue or Topic but there is no straight forward method in the Azure portal.
Solution: It is now easily possible by using Serverless360 which offers much better message processing capabilities where you can View and process Active and Dead Lettered messages. Serverless360 also allows you to repair & resubmit, purge, filter, backup messages and to perform automated tasks on messages.
Dead-Letter Message Processing
In Serverless360, it is possible to repair and resubmit the messages where a copy of the message with updated content and properties will be submitted to the target Queue/Topic and the message in source dead-letter queue will not be deleted.
Active Message Processing
Message processing capability in Serverless360 supports the processing of active messages in addition to processing dead letter messages. Execute queries to retrieve active messages from Queues/Topic in both ‘peek lock’ and ‘defer‘ mode. In addition, the service call will retrieve other information related to the message such as message-id, sequence number, size, label, error reason, enqueued time, expiry time, message details, and properties.
Service Map
Problem: By using Azure resources like Logic Apps, Service Bus, Functions, Event Grid, etc building an application has become a lot easier. the Azure portal provides you capabilities to manage them at the resource level. But what additionally required is managing them at the application level. Though these Azure resources can be grouped in a resource group, it doesn’t provide necessary visibility as an application.
Solution: We know that this problem can be solved by using Business Application but Serverless360 also has another feature called Service Maps which gives us a better understanding of the relationships between the resources associated with a Business Application.
Service Map will help users visualize how the resources in a business application relate to each other. This servers as a physical representation of the architecture, the user can derive relationships between the resources that constitute the business application. It provides a clean dashboard with a full application view and displays the state of each resource based on its monitoring configuration. Serverless360 allows you to create your own Service Maps.
Extensive Monitoring Support
Problem: Azure Monitor offers monitoring reports on individual Azure resources but the need is to get a consolidated report on an entire Azure application which is not possible and hence monitoring capabilities in the Azure portal is limited and it also doesn’t support a wide range of notification channels.
Solution: Serverless360 understands the problems faced by enterprises and offers an out-of-the-box monitoring solution that assists administrators to monitor the distributed Azure Services grouped in an integration solution. There is a main monitor setting that can be integrated with different notification channels like Slack, Teams, Webhook, etc. It also offers consolidated monitoring to keep the product team informed on the application status.
Types of Monitors
Monitoring is essential to keep an eye on Serverless components to understand if they are functioning as expected.
- Rules evaluation frequency : All the resources associated with the chosen Business Application will be monitored based on the frequency.
- Aggregation period : All the metrics of the resources associated with the chosen Business application will be aggregated using the metric’s Primary Aggregation Type, based on the Aggregation Period provided.
- Status report: A status report of the resources associated with this Business application that is chosen to be monitored will be sent in the selected hours.
- Recipient email configuration : Alerts are generally sent to mentioned Email addresses. Users can configure more than one email address and can also choose if the alerts can be sent to all the email addresses in a single go or as separate emails.
- Notification channels : Besides Email alerts, third-party Notification Channels can also be configured to receive alerts from Serverless360. Notification Channels that are already configured in the Settings section, can be chosen in the list shown.
Conclusion
Serverless360 has out of the box capabilities like Business Applications, Service Maps, Message processing in Service Bus and offers extensive monitoring support. As discussed above, these are the top features of Serverless360 which help the users to manage and monitor Azure resources in a better way.
Also, You can take a look at our pillar page dedicated to Azure Monitoring to get better insights on the topic.
