Monitoring Azure App-Services

Configuration

Azure App Service sensor can be disabled and it can be filtered by tags and resource groups. It is possible to configure Azure App Service sensor via agent configuration in <agentinstall_dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml by:

com.instana.plugin.azure.appservice:
  # Valid values: true, false
  enabled: false # enabled (true) by default
  # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format
  include_tags:
  # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format
  exclude_tags:
  # Comma separated list of resource groups
  include_resource_groups:
  # Comma separated list of resource groups
  exclude_resource_groups:

Azure App Service sensor can be disabled. To disable monitoring of the Azure App Services use the following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.azure.appservice:
  enabled: false

Multiple tags and resource groups can be defined, separated by a comma. Tags should be provided as a key-value pair separated by :. In order to make configuration easier, it is possible to define which tags and resource groups you want to include in discovery or exclude from discovery. In case of defining tag or resource group in both lists (include and exclude), exclude list has higher priority. If there is no need for services filtering, the configuration should not be defined. It's not mandatory to define all values in order to enable filtering.

To include services by tags into discovery use following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.azure.appservice:
  include_tags: # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format (e.g. env:prod,env:staging)

To exclude services by tags from discovery use following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.azure.appservice:
  exclude_tags: # Comma separated list of tags in key:value format (e.g. env:dev,env:test)

To include services by resource groups into discovery use following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.azure.appservice:
  include_resource_groups: # Comma separated list of resource groups (e.g. rg_prod,rg_staging)

To exclude services by resource groups from discovery use following configuration:

com.instana.plugin.azure.appservice:
  exclude_resource_groups: # Comma separated list of resource groups (e.g. rg_dev,rg_test)

Discovery filtering can be configured on the global level for all Azure services. In case of defining filters for Azure App Service, global filters will be overridden. For more details about global Azure service discovery filtering visit Azure Configuration.

Metrics collection

To view the metrics, select Infrastructure in the sidebar of the Instana User interface, click a specific monitored host, and then you can see a host dashboard with all the collected metrics and monitored processes.

Metrics for App-Services are pulled every minute, which is the resolution Azure provides for monitoring of these services.

Instrumentation

Currently, only instrumentation of AppService for .Net Framework 4.5.1+ workloads is supported. To make the instrumentation work, an Instana agent needs to be running where you want to monitor AppServices. For more information about how to configure Instana agent to monitor Azure, see Monitoring and Instrumenting Microsoft Azure.

Go to Azure Portal, and locate the AppService that you want to instrument. After you open the AppService in Azure Portal, click the Extensions link from the navigation menu.

In the Extensions page, you can add a new extension, check the extensions that are installed, and update or remove an extension. You must add the Instana Tracing AppService extension.

After the Instana Tracing AppService extension is installed, open the extension, and then you can see the details of the extension:

Click Browse. It leads you to a page where you can configure the instrumentation:

After you enter all the information there, click Update Config. Then, the information is saved within the context of the AppService.

Now, the only thing that needs to be done is to restart the AppService. You can do that from the Dashboard of the AppService. When you run your application, an Instana rewriter is attached to the application, and you need to start collecting traces.

To see the traces, go back to Instana UI. You can open the dashboard of your AppService entity, and from there click Upstream / Downstream. Then, you can see traces that are collected for this entity.