Azure

What is Log Analytics? Azure Log Analytics is a tool as part of Azure Monitor that we can use to query data stored in the Azure Monitor Logs store. As administrators or developers, we would use Log Analytics in the Azure portal to configure input data sources (such as Container Apps, App Service, Cosmos DB etc.) and then query thier Azure Monitor logs to gain insights on those resources. If you’ve worked with Azure for while, you’ve probably heard of (or even used) Log Analytics. Sending logs to Log Analytics is relatively straight forward, but many people just use Log Analytics as a dumping ground for their logs, and don’t take advantage of all its capabilities. ...

One important aspect of any web application is its availability. Azure provides many tools that ensures your application is up and running, one of them being availability tests, which allow you to periodically check the availability of your application. You can also generate alerts should your web application become unavailable. You can configure availability tests and alerts in your Bicep templates, automating the entire process! In this article, we’ll create a Bicep template that provisions all the resources that we’ll need (the web app, Application Insights instance, action groups etc.) and then disable our web application to trigger the alerts when our application is unavailable. ...

Azure Container Apps manages automatic horizontal scaling through declarative scaling rules. We can scale out our container apps based on a variety of different scalers. I recorded a video over the weekend covering how scaling works in Azure Container Apps, what KEDA is and how to set scaling rules within Azure Container Apps, using HTTP and Azure Queue storage scale rules as an example. If you prefer reading rather than watching, continue reading this post. I’ll only be covering the storage queue scaler in this post, so if you want to see how the HTTP scaler works, please watch the video. ...

Azure SQL triggers for Azure Functions came into public preview for C# Functions last month. When you enable Change Tracking on a table in Azure SQL Database, Managed Instance or SQL Server (yes, on-prem SQL Server), you can create a function that will be triggered every time a row is created, updated or deleted. In this article, we’ll dive into the details of SQL Trigger Functions, how Change Tracking works and how we can configure our Functions to listen to SQL Change Tracking. We’ll finish off by discussing how we can monitor how our functions scale as more changes are being processed using the scale controller logs. ...

I had a bit of time last week to do some Dapr learning, so I started to read the Dapr for .NET Developers e-book that’s available on our documentation (completely free by the way!). In one of the early chapters, the book outlines a tutorial that you can run locally to use service invocation to communicate between to two applications. Running locally is fairly straightforward, so I wanted to deploy the two applications as Container Apps, since it has support for Dapr in the platform. ...