Happy to announce that Serverless360 has extended its support for all Azure resources. In this blog, we will be discussing the Spring 2022 release of Serverless360.
Basic Resources
In Serverless360, we have several resources with advanced operations features to give the support operator the ability to do critical tasks such as managing issues with Logic Apps or the Dead Letter queue on Service Bus.
One of the common scenarios is that your app may have a resource that you want to monitor, but Serverless360 does not have advanced features for that resource type.
We added the essential resource feature for these occasions where you can add a resource to your Serverless360 Business Application. If it has metrics available via the metrics API, you can add monitoring for those metrics and create dashboards to view them.
Below you can see where I am choosing the monitor the CPU usage for a VM Scale Set.
Below you can see an example of where I have built a dashboard for the key metrics I am interested in seeing for my Key Vault.
For now, we support monitoring and dashboards for essential resources, and we intend to add more features in the future. We hope this will help us get feedback from customers on what additional features you need for the different Azure resource types.
API Endpoint Monitoring
One of the common challenges for managing and monitoring your solution is the dependency on API endpoints which may either be inside your solution or external to it.
We have added the API Endpoint monitoring feature so you can configure an API endpoint, and then Serverless360 will regularly check that it’s available.
Below you can see that my API Endpoint is registered as part of my Business Application, and it is showing its healthy monitoring status.
With API Endpoint, you can do quite a few things, such as:
- Configure monitoring of an API on a 3rd party system which I integrate, so I get alerts if the system I depend on goes down
- Ping an endpoint I have created, such as API Management, Azure Functions, or Logic Apps, and raise an alert if it goes down
- Use API Monitor to call an endpoint I create, which will then do some custom tests to ensure a system is online
There is more info on the API Endpoint monitor here.
Monitoring Calendar
We have added a new feature to the Business Application to help you see the monitoring history. The calendar view will display a timeline of the health checks and help you visualize the service level of your solution over time.
Service Map Improvements
In Serverless360, we have a feature called Service Map. This feature allows a diagram of your Business Application that can then display the monitoring status of resources.
Serverless360 will auto-generate a diagram based on the relationships we can work out. Then, the user can customize the diagram if desired to create a visual that can help users see what the solution looks like.
Below you can see an example of an interface for monitoring Logic Apps and Service Bus.
You can also click on a shape in the diagram, and it will show you information about any monitoring conditions and their status.
You can learn more about Service Map here.
Business Activity Monitoring
In Business Activity Monitoring, we have made some changes to simplify getting started. Customers told us that they would like to be able to get information showing up in BAM with less effort. We have reduced the need to spend time configuring the BAM design time transaction before you can see the information.
Now you will need to create the transaction and the first shape, and then any BAM events will show up in the new Events tab, as shown below. You can see below the runtime transaction would show up with just one shape configured.
But the new events tab would show any other events which match this transaction.
If an event matches a shape you have configured in your diagram, it will show up as a mapped event, and any that did not fit will show up too.
You can still click into the events and see any properties or message body you captured.
If you then want to use the BAM designer to represent your transaction visually, you can add shapes to the diagram matching your event. You could then see a diagram like the below, which could help your support users and business users to see what happened in the integration by creating an expectation of what should have happened, which displays events that occurred.
You can learn more about Business Activity Monitoring here:
- Serverless360 Azure Distributed Tracing Tool
- What is Business Activity Monitoring?
- BAM for real-world Cloud Integration in Microsoft Azure
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