Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - November 2025
In this issue: Ace Aviator of the Month News from our product group News from our community Ace Aviator of the Month Novembers’s Ace Aviator: Al Ghoniem What's your role and title? What are your responsibilities? As a Senior Integration Consultant, I design and deliver enterprise-grade integration on Microsoft Azure, primarily using Logic Apps Standard, API Management, Service Bus, Event Grid and Azure Functions. My remit covers reference architectures, “golden” templates, governance and FinOps guardrails, CI/CD automation (Bicep and YAML), and production-ready patterns for reliability, observability and cost efficiency. Alongside my technical work, I lead teams of consultants and engineers, helping them adopt standardised delivery models, mentor through code reviews and architectural walkthroughs, and ensure we deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes across projects. I also help teams apply decisioning patterns (embedded versus external rules) and integrate AI responsibly within enterprise workflows. Can you give us some insights into your day-to-day activities and what a typical day in your role looks like? Architecture and patterns: refining solution designs, sequence diagrams and rules models for new and existing integrations. Build and automation: evolving reusable Logic App Standard templates, Bicep modules and pipelines, embedding monitoring, alerts and identity-first security. Problem-solving: addressing performance tuning, transient fault handling, poison/DLQ flows and “design for reprocessing.” Leadership and enablement: mentoring consultants, facilitating technical discussions, and ensuring knowledge is shared across teams. Community and writing: publishing articles and examples to demystify real-world integration trade-offs. What motivates and inspires you to be an active member of the Aviators/Microsoft community? The community continuously turns hard-won lessons into reusable practices. Sharing patterns (and anti-patterns) saves others time and incidents, while learning from peers strengthens my own work. Microsoft’s product teams also listen closely, and seeing customer feedback directly shape the platform is genuinely rewarding. Looking back, what advice do you wish you had been given earlier that you'd now share with those looking to get into STEM/technology? Optimise for learning speed, not titles. Choose problems that stretch you and deliver in small, measurable increments. Master the fundamentals. Naming, idempotency, retries and observability are not glamorous but make systems dependable. Document everything. Diagrams, runbooks and ADRs multiply your impact. Understand trade-offs. Every decision buys something and costs something; acknowledge both sides clearly. Value collaboration over heroics. Ask questions, share knowledge and give credit freely. What has helped you grow professionally? Reusable scaffolding: creating golden templates and reference repositories that capture best practice once and reuse it everywhere. Feedback loops: leveraging telemetry, post-incident reviews and peer critique to improve. Teaching and mentoring: explaining concepts to others brings clarity and strengthens leadership. Cross-disciplinary curiosity: combining architecture, DevOps, FinOps and AI to address problems holistically. If you had a magic wand that could create a feature in Logic Apps, what would it be and why? "Stateful Sessions and Decisions” as a first-class capability: Built-in session state across multiple workflows, durable correlation and resumable orchestrations without external storage. A native decisioning activity with versioned decision tables and rule auditing (“why this rule fired”). A local-first developer experience with fast testing and contract validation for confident iteration. This would simplify complex, human-in-the-loop and event-driven scenarios, reduce custom plumbing, and make advanced orchestration patterns accessible to a wider audience. News from our product group Logic Apps Community Day 2025 Did you miss or want to catch up again on your favorite Logic Apps Community Day videos – jump back into action on this four hours long learning session, with 10 sessions from our Community Experts. And stay tuned for individual sessions being shared throughout the week. Announcing Parse & Chunk with Metadata in Logic Apps: Build Context-Aware RAG Agents New Parse & Chunk actions add metadata like page numbers and sentence completeness—perfect for context-aware document Q&A using Azure AI Search and Agent Loop. Introducing the RabbitMQ Connector (Public Preview) The new connector (Public Preview) lets you send and receive messages with RabbitMQ in Logic Apps Standard and Hybrid—ideal for scalable, reliable messaging across industries. News from our community EventGrid And Entra Auth In Logic Apps Standard Post by Riccardo Viglianisi Learn how to use Entra Auth for webhook authentication, ditch SAS tokens, and configure private endpoints with public access rules—perfect for secure, scalable integrations. Debugging XSLT Made Easy in VS Code: .NET-Based Debugging for Logic Apps Post by Daniel Jonathan A new .NET-based extension brings real debugging to XSLT for Logic Apps. Set breakpoints, step through transformations, and inspect variables—making XSLT development clear and productive. This is the 3 rd post in a 5 part series, so worth checking out the other posts too. Modifying the Logic App Azure Workbook: Custom Views for Multi Workflow Monitoring Post by Jeff Wessling Learn how to tailor dashboards with KQL, multi-workflow views, and context panes—boosting visibility, troubleshooting speed, and operational efficiency across your integrations. Azure AI Agents in Logic Apps: A Guide to Automate Decisions Post by Imashi Kinigama Discover how GPT-powered agents, created using Logic Apps Agent Loop, automate decisions, extract data, and adapt in real time. Build intelligent workflows with minimal effort—no hardcoding, just instructions and tools. How to Turn Logic App Connectors into MCP Servers (Step-by-Step Guide) Post by Stephen W. Thomas Learn how to expose connectors like Google Drive or Salesforce as MCP endpoints using Azure API Center—giving AI agents secure, real-time access to 1,400+ services directly from VS Code. Custom SAP MCP Server with Logic Apps Post by Sebastian Meyer Learn how to turn Logic Apps into AI-accessible tools using MCP. From workflow descriptions to Easy Auth setup and VS Code integration—this guide unlocks SAP automation with Copilot. How Azure Logic Apps as MCP Servers Accelerate AI Agent Development Post by Monisha S Turn 1,400+ connectors into AI tools with Logic Apps Standard. Build agents fast, integrate with legacy systems, and scale intelligent workflows across your organization. Designing Business Rules in Azure Logic Apps: When to Go Embedded vs External Post by Al Ghoniem Learn when to use Logic Apps' native Rules Engine or offload to Azure Functions with NRules or JSON RulesEngine. Discover hybrid patterns for scalable, testable decision automation. Syncing SharePoint with Azure Blob Storage using Logic Apps & Azure Functions for Azure AI Search Post by Daniel Jonathan Solve folder delete issues by tagging blobs with SharePoint metadata. Use Logic Apps and a custom Azure Function to clean up orphaned files and keep Azure AI Search in sync. Step-by-Step Guide: Building a Conversational Agent in Azure Logic Apps Post by Stephen W. Thomas Use Azure AI Foundry and Logic Apps Standard to create chatbots that shuffle cards, answer questions, and embed into websites—no code required, just smart workflows and EasyAuth. You can hide sensitive data from the Logic App run history Post by Francisco Leal Learn how to protect sensitive data like authentication tokens, credentials, and personal information in Logic App, so this data don’t appear in the run history, which could pose security and privacy risks.Publish, Protect and Validate OData APIs in API Management
We are excited to announce the public preview of the OData API type in Azure API Management (API Management). OData (Open Data Protocol) is a standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData gained popularity as an industry standard for data integration and interoperability and has been widely adopted by large companies such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and others. This new capability extends the benefits and capabilities of API Management to OData APIs, including the ability to secure them with standard API protections, such as authentication, authorization, and rate limiting, in combination with OData-specific policies for request validation. First-class support for OData makes it easier for customers to publish OData APIs in API Management eliminating the need to first convert OData metadata to OpenAPI. The rest of the blog will show how simple and quick it is to onboard to and protect an OData API with API Management. An example: Importing and protecting an OData API from SAP I will be using the publicly available SAP Gateway Demo system ES5 which provides a practical, working OData service with a dataset containing a list of items of a sales order from the Enterprise Procurement demo data. It contains EntitySets such as: BusinessPartnerSet ProductSet SalesOrderSet SalesOrderLineItemSet Export an OData metadata file and create an OData API from the update-enabled SAP Gateway Demo API “GWSAMPLE_BASIC” and now I can import this as an OData API into API . To create an OData API within the Azure API Management service: Open the Azure Portal in your browser Select your Azure API Management service or create a new one Select the APIs blade Select +Add API Fill in the form: Choose a Display name (sap-odata-test) The name field will auto-fill with a suitable name Select the file that contains the metadata for an API Choose an API URL suffix (sap-odata-test) Select Create to create the API After the API is created, the entity sets and functions appear on the API’s schema tab. Add policy for an OData request validation With the introduction of OData API type into Azure API Management we added the new `validate-odata-request` policy which validates the request URL, headers, and parameters of a request to an OData API to ensure conformance with the OData specification. Now I can add an OData request validation policy to the imported SAP Gateway Demo API: Select API Policies tab Select </> in the Inbound processing section to edit the policy Add a <validate-odata-request> to the policy definition <policies> <inbound> <validate-odata-request default-odata-version="4.01" min-odata-version="4.0" max-odata-version="4.01" /> <base /> </inbound> … </policies> Resulting policy should look the following Select Save to apply changes to the policy If I try to request an EntitySet with a non-existing property, API Management will validate this request and return an error. I will send a request for ProductSet with a property ‘Name1’ using Postman: The request was validated by Azure API Management, and I received a response stating that property could not be found. { "statusCode": 400, "message": "Could not find a property named 'Name1' on type 'GWSAMPLE_BASIC.Product'." } In combination with the large set of policies available in API Management, such as authorization, authentication, rate limiting and more, you can further enhance the security of your OData APIs For instance, you can exchange Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) issued tokens for an SAP issued Bearer token and forward it to backend with caching support for both tokens. Policy snippet available here. Next steps Kickstart your SAP app integration project on Azure leveraging OData and the SAP Cloud SDK from here. To hit the ground running, find publicly available SAP OData APIs or mock services here. OData API type in Azure API Management is in public preview, give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments below!
Call SAP OData Service in Logic App through On-Premise Data Gateway
Hello, I want to call an Odata Service of my SAP system. The service is only available in the private network, therefore the call only works via an On Premise Data Gateway. This gateway is already set up and works in the Azure Portal. Using a Postman Collection I have built a Custom Connector which I call in my Logic App. The connector is connected via the gateway to a computer which is logged on to the VPN. My problem is that I can't provide the authentication data for the logon to the SAP system and therefore for the call of the OData service. Is there a possibility to include this authentication data in the request? I have already been able to connect successfully to the SAP system via that gateway, but only to call RFC modules, for example. Is there a way to do this with an OData service? What is the best way for calling an on-premise SAP OData Service in a Logic App? Or is there maybe a way to send an Http request via the On Premise Data Gateway? Thank you!
