Integration Environment Update: Introducing Unified Monitoring and Business Process Tracking Update

This post is a collaboration between Divya Swarnkar and Kent Weare

 

We are excited to announce a new capability in Integration Environment that allows you to monitor Azure Integration Services, including Azure Logic Apps, Azure Service Bus, and Azure API Management (APIM), from a single pane of glass. This enhancement is designed to streamline your monitoring experience, providing a comprehensive view of your integration workflows and services. Here’s why this is important and how it will benefit you.

 

Integration Environment and Grouping AIS Resources

The Integration Environment was launched with a vision to provide a dedicated landing zone for Azure Integration Services. Alongside this, we introduced the capability to group AIS resources as an application. The unified monitoring experience leverages the Integration Environment as this landing zone, utilizing the grouping capability to organize AIS resources effectively as an application. This approach enhances the monitoring experience by aligning it with the application-centric view of your resources, making management and troubleshooting more intuitive and efficient.

 

Why Unified Monitoring Matters

Simplified Operations: With telemetry from Logic Apps, Service Bus, and APIM consolidated in a single Application Insights instance, you can view and manage your integration services more efficiently. This reduces the complexity of switching between multiple monitoring tools, allowing you to focus on what matters most – your business processes.

Enhanced Visibility: A unified monitoring dashboard offers a holistic view of your integration landscape. This comprehensive visibility helps in quickly identifying and diagnosing issues across different services, ensuring that your workflows run smoothly and without interruptions.

Improved Performance Monitoring: By centralizing telemetry, you can better analyze performance metrics and detect anomalies across all your integration services. This enables proactive troubleshooting and optimization, leading to improved reliability and performance of your applications.

Streamlined Troubleshooting: When issues arise, having all relevant data in one place accelerates the troubleshooting process. You can trace the root cause of problems across your Logic Apps, Service Bus, and APIM without having to piece together information from disparate sources.

 

How to Get Started

To start using this new capability, ensure that telemetry from all your resources in Azure Integration Services is directed to the same Application Insights instance. Select the appropriate instance from the dropdown menu in your monitoring dashboard, and you’re ready to go.

 

Here are the steps –

• In Azure Portal, navigate to your Integration Environment resource and and application in it. For the selected application, go to Application monitoring > Insights.
• Before you use the dashboard, select the Application Insights workspace from the drop-down menu.

 

There are three key tabs on this dashboard which are organized by the type of service in AIS. For each tab, there are subtabs which are organized based on the categories relevant for that service. Let’s look into each of them –

 

Logic Apps

The Overview tab provides an aggregated view into the Logic Apps and workflows in your application. You can look into the workflow level details in the worklow tab. For the workflows that needs more analysis, you can use the Runs tab to drill down into the run history and action failures. Finally, the Compute tab gives you the underlying compute utilization for these workloads.

 

 

Service Bus

For Service Bus, you have tabs to analyze the aggregated data for the entities that are in your application. The Requests tab helps you get more information on the Requests received and their status by the entities (queues/topics). The Messages tab likewise shows you the detailed information on the Messages in the entities and their status.

 

API Management

The Timeline provides time charts to see the overall trends for the requests and the response times. You can get detailed information about the status and processing times of each requests by APIs and Operations through the APIs and Operations tabs.

 

We believe this new feature will greatly enhance your monitoring experience and provide significant value to your integration projects. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue to improve unified monitoring experience for Azure Integration Services.

 

Feedback opportunity

If you are interested in participating in 1:1 feedback session regarding operation and monitoring of integration applications, we would love to hear from you. Please fill this form (https://aka.ms/unifiedais-preview) and we’ll reach out to you.

 

To see the recorded demo of this capability, please watch this YouTube video.

 

Business Process Tracking Update

In addition to the unified monitoring investments made to Integration Environment, we also have some Business Process Tracking updates to share with you. The updates to Business Process Tracking are the direct result of customer feedback from organizations using our features launched at Ignite 2023.

 

Updates to Business Process Tracking include:

• Business Process Tracking is a top level Azure Resource
  • Business Processes can be added to an Integration Application as part of our unified experience
• Business Process stages now have two statues
  • Successful
  • Failed
• Enhanced Token Picker
  • Transaction ID (formerly Business Id) now supports expressions
  • Variable support
  • Emit Boolean values at runtime

To try out the new Business Process Tracking capabilities, please perform the following steps:

• In the Azure Portal, search for Business Process Tracking and click on the name of the service.

 

 

 

• Click on Create to begin the provisioning process

 

 

• Provide the required configuration details including the Transaction ID  and the Azure Data Explorer (ADX) details in the Storage tab.
  • Note: We are now referring to the Business ID as the Transaction ID to allow for more consistency in the offering. We have also moved the ADX configuration details from the Integration Application provisioning to the Business Process Tracking experience.

 

 

 

 

 

• We now have an Overview page for your business process which acts as a landing page for the resource. To open up the designer, click on the Editor link.

 

 

 

• Build out your Business Process by clicking on the + to add stages.
• For each stage, provide data properties that you would like to track at that particular stage. You have the option to include both Success and Failure properties based upon your needs.

Note: Each stage must have a Success status modeled. Adding a Failure status is optional.

 

 

 

• Save your work as you proceed in building your business process.
• Once you have finished defining your stages, you can now begin the process of mapping your business process to the underlying Logic Apps implementation by toggling Show data source settings on.

 

 

 

 

• For each stage you will need to select an Azure Subscription, Logic App and Workflow. Once you have configured these values, then click on the Select data sources link.

 

 

• Where ever you have a Success or Failed status defined, you need to select a Point-in-time action which represents the trigger/action where you want to emit data to Azure Data Explorer. These point-in-time actions should be different between Success and Failure statuses.

 

 

 

 

• As you complete your mappings, do Save and Validate your work

 

 

 

• Once you have completed your mappings and have no validation errors, you can deploy your business process by clicking on the Deploy link.

 

 

 

• After you have deployed your business process, tracking profiles will be injected into the Artifacts/Tracking Profiles directory in the Logic App(s) that are used in your mappings. Your Logic App will also restart and any new transactions should have their data tracked. You can view this data by clicking on the Transactions link.

 

 

 

• You can drill into a specific transaction by clicking on the applicable Transaction ID (Ticket Number). When you do so, you will see an overlay of your business process and the underlying data

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• To view the data for a particular stage, click on it and you will see the data that was tracked during that stage.

 

 

With your solution now tracking your data, you can extend your experience by consuming this data in other analytics tools like Power BI or Azure Monitor Workbooks.

 

Have feedback?

Please submit the following form.

 

If you would like to see a recorded demo of this content, please watch the following YouTube video.