3. What Dashboard Charts do I Want?

Question

Hi all;

Ok, Azure monitoring, dashboards, and Application Insights can do pretty much anything, which is wonderful. But the flips side of that is how do I figure out what I want to do where. I could spend weeks, maybe months, focused on this. Meanwhile I have users screaming for new features. So...

I have a Blazor Interactive Server app using ASP.NET version 8. And using Entity Frameworks for accessing the DB and the ASP.NET Identity Library for users & claims.

The single biggest activity of the website is searching for matching events for a user. The search may have keywords, but also may not. The search is rules based where it is 1 (no keywords) or 2 complex selects against Azure SQL Database. If the search has keywords the 1st search uses SQL Server's full text search capability which returns ranking.

The rules based search is both a complex SQL query (this is all Entity Frameworks where the Event record has a join with several other tables that are searched. And those results are applied to the ranking).

The secondary activity is standard CRUD activity. But this is rare enough that we'll likely not even load test it (it's unlikely that even 2 events will be created at the same time).

The database has no BLOBs in it aside from RowVersion where I need to test for update concurrency issues. All BLOBs are in Azure storage BLOB containers and the database rows have the container/filename to the BLOB. All web pages have a url to the appropriate BLOB(s).

The system stack also includes: Azure Key Vault, Azure Maps, Azure OpenAI, SendGrid, & Twilio. Azure Maps is the only one of these where the performance is critical to our app.

The Azure App Service is set to be 2 instances. And I'll probably set it to auto-scale out in the future (that will be a future question).

The repositories are two Azure SQL Databases, one for the Identity Library which is users & their claims. The other is the application database which does most of the work. There is one instance of each.

If it gets busy enough I'll look at Front Door, App Servers and a DB instance also on the west coast, CloudFlare, and maybe SignalR servers. But again, that's for another day.

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So here are my questions. And keep in mind this is mostly just tell me which chart and for question 3, a pointer to a web page that explains how to do it. I can create dashboards & charts, I'm just not sure which ones to create.

1. There are charts in App Server Monitoring, Dashboards, & Application Insights. What should I do where? I think the answer is put this all in 3 dashboards, but maybe I want some charts in Application Insights?
2. The dashboard blade has a Create App Server dashboard that creates a dashboard with 9 charts. And a database one that also creates a dashboard with 9 charts. So great detailed dashboards. But I want to have a master dashboard with just 3 – 5 charts. So…
   1. What charts for the app server should I have in this?
   2. What charts for the DB should I have in this? I have 2 databases so if there are 3 DB charts, that’s actually 6 to display.
   3. Are there any other tiles I should have in this master dashboard? Such as:
      1. Health Checks
      2. Errors and warnings from the log
3. For marketing and management use how do I create charts to show:
   1. For usage/adoption measurement we need to track in a chart user signups, events created, etc. where these records have a Created DateTime column. Can this be displayed in a dashboard? If so, how?
   2. And additional charts for total users, organizations, events, & signups (count of records in the 4 tables).
   3. I’d also like a public dashboard showing how busy it is. What App Server metric(s) should we display for that? I’m thinking active sessions, request count, and searches?
4. What alerts should I create, and with what settings. I want to error on the side of no false positives which yes, means I will find out about some issues via user complaints.

thanks - dave