Monitoring App Configuration

Article
04/14/2023

When you have critical applications and business processes relying on Azure resources, you want to monitor those resources for their availability, performance, and operation.

This article describes the monitoring data generated by App Configuration. App Configuration uses Azure Monitor. If you are unfamiliar with the features of Azure Monitor common to all Azure services that use it, read Monitoring Azure resources with Azure Monitor.

Monitoring overview page in the Azure portal

The Overview page in the Azure portal includes a brief view of the resource usage, such as the total number of requests, number of throttled requests, and request duration per configuration store. This information is useful, but only displays a small amount of the monitoring data available. Some of this monitoring data is collected automatically and is available for analysis as soon as you create the resource. You can enable additional types of data collection with some configuration.

Monitoring on the Overview Page

Monitoring data

App Configuration collects the same kinds of monitoring data as other Azure resources that are described in Monitoring data from Azure resources. See Monitoring App Configuration data reference for detailed information on the metrics and logs metrics created by App Configuration.

Collection and routing

Platform metrics and the activity log are collected and stored automatically, but can be routed to other locations by using a diagnostic setting.

Resource Logs are not collected and stored until you create a diagnostic setting and route them to one or more locations. For example, to view logs and metrics for a configuration store in near real-time in Azure Monitor, collect the resource logs in a Log Analytics workspace. If you do not already have one, create a Log Analytics Workspace and follow these steps to create and enable a diagnostic setting.

Sign in to the Azure portal.
Navigate to your App Configuration store.
In the Monitoring section, select Diagnostic settings, then select +Add diagnostic setting.
In the Diagnostic setting page, enter a name for your setting, then select HttpRequest and choose the destination to send your logs to. To send them to a Log Analytics workspace, choose Send to Log Analytics workspace.
Enter the name of your Subscription and Log Analytics Workspace.
Select Save and verify that the Diagnostic Settings page now lists your new diagnostic setting.

Open the Azure Cloud Shell, or if you've installed the Azure CLI locally, open a command console application such as Windows PowerShell.
If your identity is associated with more than one subscription, then set your active subscription to the subscription of the storage account that you want to enable logs for.
```
az account set --subscription <your-subscription-id>
```

Enable logs by using the az monitor diagnostic-settings create command.

az monitor diagnostic-settings create --name <setting-name> --workspace <log-analytics-workspace-resource-id> --resource <app-configuration-resource-id> --logs '[{"category": <category name>, "enabled": true "retentionPolicy": {"days": <days>, "enabled": <retention-bool}}]'

Open a Windows PowerShell command window, and sign in to your Azure subscription by using the Connect-AzAccount command. Then, follow the on-screen directions.
```
Connect-AzAccount
```
Set your active subscription to the subscription of the App Configuration account that you want to enable logging for.
```
Set-AzContext -SubscriptionId <subscription-id>
```

To enable logs for a Log Analytics Workspace, use the Set-AzDiagnosticSetting PowerShell cmdlet.

Set-AzDiagnosticSetting -ResourceId <app-configuration-resource-id> -WorkspaceId <log-analytics-workspace-resource-id> -Enabled $true

Verify that your diagnostic setting is correctly set and log categories are enabled.
```
Get-AzureRmDiagnosticSetting -ResourceId <app-configuration-resource-id> 
```

For more information on creating a diagnostic setting using the Azure portal, CLI, or PowerShell, see create a diagnostic setting to collect platform logs and metrics in Azure.

When you create a diagnostic setting, you specify which categories of logs to collect. For further information on the categories of logs for App Configuration, reference App Configuration monitoring data reference.

Analyzing metrics

You can analyze metrics for App Configuration with metrics from other Azure services using metrics explorer by opening Metrics from the Azure Monitor menu. See Analyze metrics with Azure Monitor metrics explorer for details on using this tool. For App Configuration, the following metrics are collected:

Http Incoming Request Count
Http Incoming Request Duration
Throttled Http Request Count (Http status code 429 Responses)
Daily Storage Usage
Request Quota Usage
Replication Latency
Snapshot Storage Size

In the portal, navigate to the Metrics section and select the Metric Namespaces and Metrics you want to analyze. This screenshot shows you the metrics view when selecting Http Incoming Request Count for your configuration store.

How to use App Config Metrics

For a list of the platform metrics collected for App Configuration, see Monitoring App Configuration data reference metrics. For reference, you can also see a list of all resource metrics supported in Azure Monitor.

Analyzing logs

Data in Azure Monitor Logs is stored in tables where each table has its own set of unique properties. The common schema is outlined in Azure Monitor resource log schema.

The Activity log is a platform log in Azure that provides insight into subscription-level events. You can view it independently or route it to Azure Monitor Logs, where you can do much more complex queries using Log Analytics.
For a list of the types of resource logs collected for App Configuration, see Monitoring App Configuration data reference. For a list of the tables used by Azure Monitor Logs and queryable by Log Analytics, see Monitoring App Configuration data reference

Important

When you select Logs from the App Configuration menu, Log Analytics is opened with the query scope set to the current app configuration resource. This means that log queries will only include data from that resource.

If you want to run a query that includes data from other configuration or data from other Azure services, select Logs from the Azure Monitor menu. See Log query scope and time range in Azure Monitor Log Analytics for details.

In the portal, navigate to the Logs section, and then to the query editor. On the left under the Tables tab, select AACHttpRequest to see the logs of your configuration store. Enter a Kusto query into the editor and results will be displayed below.

Writing kusto queries in our logs

Following are sample queries that you can use to help you monitor your App Configuration resource.

List all Http Requests in the last three days

   AACHttpRequest
    | where TimeGenerated > ago(3d)

List all throttled requests (returned Http status code 429 for too many requests) in the last three days
```
   AACHttpRequest
    | where TimeGenerated > ago(3d)
    | where StatusCode == "429"
```

List the number of requests sent in the last three days by IP Address

   AACHttpRequest
    | where TimeGenerated > ago(3d)
    | summarize requestCount=sum(HitCount) by ClientIPAddress
    | order by requestCount desc

Create a pie chart of the types of status codes received in the last three days

   AACHttpRequest
    | where TimeGenerated > ago(3d)
    | summarize requestCount=sum(HitCount) by StatusCode
    | order by requestCount desc 
    | render piechart

List the number of requests sent by day for the last 14 days

AACHttpRequest
    | where TimeGenerated > ago(14d)
    | extend Day = startofday(TimeGenerated)
    | summarize requestcount=sum(HitCount) by Day
    | order by Day desc

Alerts

Azure Monitor alerts proactively notify you when important conditions are found in your monitoring data. They allow you to identify and address issues in your system before your customers notice them. You can set alerts on metrics, logs, and the activity log. Different types of alerts have benefits and drawbacks. The following table lists common and recommended alert rules for App Configuration.

Alert type	Condition	Description
Request quota usage exceeded	RequestQuotaUsage >= 100	The configuration store has exceeded the request quota usage. Upgrade to a standard tier store or follow the best practices to optimize your usage.

Next steps

See Monitoring App Configuration data reference for a reference of the metrics, logs, and other important values created by App Configuration.
See Monitoring Azure resources with Azure Monitor for details on monitoring Azure resources.

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