Monitoring Azure Logic Apps: The Proactive Approach – News Block

Currently available options for monitoring Azure Logic App

Azure Monitor provides built-in monitoring capabilities for Azure resources, including logic apps. It offers metrics and alerts to monitor various aspects of Logic Apps such as execution times, successful executions, failed executions, etc.

App Insights (a part of Azure Monitor) supports dependency visualization and helps troubleshoot by logging telemetry data. Although they offer basic monitoring and alerting capabilities, there are certain drawbacks to be aware of:

Drawbacks of native Azure monitoring tools

Lack of Consolidated Monitoring: It would be difficult to visualize how the logic apps in an Azure app relate to each other, and currently there is no ability to monitor the health, performance, or availability of multiple logic apps in a single alert.

Difficult to be proactive:The absence of warning alerts in Azure Monitor means you can miss early indicators or potential issues that don’t reach the error threshold but still require attention. It limits your ability to proactively address emerging issues before they become bigger problems.

Insufficient automation capabilities: Lacks automation to reprocess failed logical runs. Therefore, you will often need manual intervention to address failed executions, which can be time consuming and error prone.

No labeling available: It does not offer tagging capabilities to correlate original and forwarded Logic App runs. This makes it difficult to track the history of runs that have already been resubmitted.

Restricted number of Metrics: Azure Monitor allows only a limited number of metrics per alert rule. This means that if you want to monitor Logic Apps on a larger number of metrics, you’ll need to configure multiple alert rules accordingly.

Lack of a metrics dashboard in all regions: This hinders the ability to have a consolidated view of metrics data for logic apps deployed in different regions.

Manual recovery from downtime: Azure Monitor does not offer self-healing capabilities to return Logic Apps to the expected state in case of downtime or errors.

Limited notification channel support: You only have a restricted range of notification channels available, which limits the options through which you can receive alerts.

Various enterprise level monitoring solutions are available in the market to address the aforementioned limitations. One of them is Serverless360, an advanced cloud management platform built explicitly for Azure.

How Serverless360 helps overcome obstacles in Azure native monitoring tools?

Serverless360 is an advanced monitoring tool for Azure Logic App that offers offerings beyond what is provided by the native Azure monitor. It mainly consists of four modules to facilitate the management and monitoring of Azure, each with a different purpose: holistic monitoring, end-to-end monitoring, cost management, and documentation generation for Azure environments.

Leaving that aside, now let’s look at the features that make the platform stand out when it comes to Azure Logic Apps:

Monitor multiple logic app metrics in a single alert

When trying to monitor Logic Apps on a large number of metrics, one limitation to keep in mind is that a single alert in Azure Monitor can only support up to 5 conditions. You may need to set up multiple alerts to cover all required metrics. This can potentially lead to a higher number of alerts and a higher risk of alert fatigue.

Serverless360 can be valuable in such situations. With that, you can monitor a wide range of metrics in a single alert at no additional cost, and get a consolidated report with insights into your logic app’s performance, availability, health, and more.

Set up proactive monitoring on multiple metrics/properties

Relying on error-based alerts from Azure Monitor can cause delays in identifying and resolving logic app errors. However, using Serverless360 can help you establish a proactive monitoring approach by setting up warning alerts and receiving notifications before reaching the maximum error threshold.

It allows us to compare corresponding metrics such as Runs Succeeded Vs Runs Failed and get warning alerts based on set conditions.

Reprocess failed logic app runs

Failed Logic App runs can be quickly accessed and reprocessed with Serverless360, where each failed run will be resubmitted with the same inputs and triggers as the original. In addition, a tag containing the details of the parent run is added to the forwarded runs, providing the correlation between the parent and child runs.

Out-of-the-box functions to efficiently handle failed logic app executions:

Automated forwarding: Automatically resubmit multiple failed logic app runs based on failure reasons or the specified aggregation period.

Consolidated view of failed runs– View all failed runs that require immediate corrective action in a single tab, making it easy to identify and efficiently address issues.

Run history and details: Access the run history of a particular logic app workflow and get detailed information such as run triggers, actions, inputs, and more.

Tracking and alerts: Monitor failed logic app runs and receive alerts whenever a violation occurs, ensuring timely resolution of issues.

Smart Automation

It is now possible to automatically fix the health of your logic apps without the need for manual intervention. For example, if the resource is accidentally deactivated, Serverless360 supports automatically activating the logic app and restoring its active state.

The platform also offers automated actions when a threshold violation occurs. For example, if you want to resubmit failed logic app runs when the count reaches 5, there are options to automate the whole process. By configuring the appropriate actions, you can detect the violation and automatically initiate resubmission of scheduled runs.

Customizable dashboard to visualize metrics

You can choose and arrange various charts, graphs, and widgets to display key metrics like success rates, failure rates, resource utilization, and more. This customizable dashboard provides a clear and intuitive way to get information about the performance and health of various logic apps.

Map dependency between Logic Apps and other Azure services

Get a holistic view of all your logic apps across subscriptions and regions from the context of an app. With this, you can visualize how services are interconnected with each other, providing insight into the overall architecture and dependencies. There are built-in color indications to represent the health status of individual logic apps.

End-to-end message tracking in Logic Apps

In scenarios where an application workflow involves multiple Logic Apps, achieving Azure Logic Apps correlation and end-to-end tracing becomes crucial to troubleshooting. For example, when a message goes through five logic apps to complete a specific business process, it will be essential to determine if all stages were executed successfully and this can be accomplished effortlessly using Serverless360 BAM.

Advanced Security Addition

There are options to enable granular access control and comprehensive auditing capabilities. With these, users can manage permissions and set access to Logic Apps, ensuring that only authorized people can perform specific actions. The platform also logs all activities performed in Logic Apps through Serverless360.

All of these features apply to both resource types in your logic app (consumer and standard).

Conclusion

This blog emphasizes the importance of taking a proactive approach to monitoring Azure Logic Apps. It identifies the limitations of Azure native monitoring tools and highlights how Serverless360 can overcome these challenges with its support for consolidated monitoring, intelligent automation, reprocessing capabilities, message tracking, and more.