Quickstart: Monitor applications end-to-end

Article
09/30/2024

Note

The Basic, Standard, and Enterprise plans will be deprecated starting from mid-March, 2025, with a 3 year retirement period. We recommend transitioning to Azure Container Apps. For more information, see the Azure Spring Apps retirement announcement.

The Standard consumption and dedicated plan will be deprecated starting September 30, 2024, with a complete shutdown after six months. We recommend transitioning to Azure Container Apps. For more information, see Migrate Azure Spring Apps Standard consumption and dedicated plan to Azure Container Apps.

This article applies to: ❎ Basic/Standard ✅ Enterprise

This quickstart shows you how monitor apps running the Azure Spring Apps Enterprise plan by using Application Insights and Log Analytics.

Note

You can monitor your Spring workloads end-to-end by using any tool and platform of your choice, including App Insights, Log Analytics, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Elastic, or Splunk. For more information, see Working with other monitoring tools later in this article.

Prerequisites

An Azure account with an active subscription. Create an account for free.
Understand and fulfill the Requirements section of Enterprise plan in Azure Marketplace.
The Azure CLI version 2.45.0 or higher.
Git.
The Azure Spring Apps Enterprise plan extension. Use the following command to remove previous versions and install the latest Enterprise plan extension. If you previously installed the spring-cloud extension, uninstall it to avoid configuration and version mismatches.
```
az extension add --upgrade --name spring
az extension remove --name spring-cloud
```
Resources to monitor, such as the ones created in the following quickstarts:

Update applications

You must manually provide the Application Insights connection string to the Order Service (ASP.NET core) and Cart Service (python) applications. The following instructions describe how to provide this connection string and increase the sampling rate to Application Insights.

Note

Currently only the buildpacks for Java and NodeJS applications support Application Insights instrumentation.

Create variables to hold the resource names by using the following commands. Be sure to replace the placeholders with your own values. The name of your Azure Spring Apps service instance must be between 4 and 32 characters long and can contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. The first character of the service name must be a letter and the last character must be either a letter or a number.
```
export RESOURCE_GROUP="<resource-group-name>"
export APP_INSIGHTS_NAME="<app-insights-name>"
export KEY_VAULT_NAME="<key-vault-name>"
export AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME="<Azure-Spring-Apps-service-instance-name>"
```
Note

By default, the APP_INSIGHTS_NAME is same as the AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME.

Use the following commands to retrieve the Application Insights connection string and set it in Key Vault:

export CONNECTION_STRING=$(az monitor app-insights component show \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --app ${APP_INSIGHTS_NAME} \
    --query "connectionString" \
    --output tsv)

az keyvault secret set \
    --vault-name ${KEY_VAULT_NAME} \
    --name "ApplicationInsights--ConnectionString" \
    --value ${CONNECTION_STRING}

Use the following command to update the sampling rate for the Application Insights binding to increase the amount of data available:

az spring build-service builder buildpack-binding set \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --builder-name default \
    --name default \
    --type ApplicationInsights \
    --properties sampling-rate=100 connection_string=${CONNECTION_STRING}

Use the following commands to restart applications to reload configuration:

az spring app restart \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --name cart-service

az spring app restart \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --name order-service

az spring app restart \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --name catalog-service

az spring app restart \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --name frontend

az spring app restart \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --name payment-service

If you've configured single sign-on, use the following commands to restart applications to reload identity-service app configuration:
```
az spring app restart \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --name identity-service
```
For the Java and NodeJS applications, restarting will allow the new sampling rate to take effect. For the non-Java applications, restarting will allow them to access the newly added Instrumentation Key from the Key Vault.

View logs

There are two ways to see logs on Azure Spring Apps: log streaming of real-time logs per app instance or Log Analytics for aggregated logs with advanced query capability

Use log streaming

Generate traffic in the application by moving through the application, viewing the catalog, and placing orders. Use the following commands to generate traffic continuously, until canceled:

export GATEWAY_URL=$(az spring gateway show \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --query "properties.url" \
    --output tsv)

export GATEWAY_URL=https://${GATEWAY_URL} 

cd azure-spring-apps-enterprise/load-test/traffic-generator
./gradlew gatlingRun-com.vmware.acme.simulation.GuestSimulation.java

Use the following command to get the latest 100 lines of application console logs from the Catalog Service application:

az spring app logs \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --name catalog-service \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --lines 100

By adding the --follow option, you can get real-time log streaming from an app. Use the following command to try log streaming for the Catalog Service application:

az spring app logs \
    --resource-group ${RESOURCE_GROUP} \
    --name catalog-service \
    --service ${AZURE_SPRING_APPS_SERVICE_INSTANCE_NAME} \
    --follow

Tip

You can use az spring app logs --help to explore more parameters and log stream functionalities.

Use Log Analytics

Navigate to the Azure portal and open the Log Analytics instance that you created. You can find the Log Analytics instance in the same resource group where you created the Azure Spring Apps service instance.

On the Log Analytics page, select the Logs pane and run any of the following sample queries for Azure Spring Apps.

Type and run the following Kusto query to see application logs:

AppPlatformLogsforSpring
| where TimeGenerated > ago(24h)
| limit 500
| sort by TimeGenerated
| project TimeGenerated, AppName, Log