App Insights for Power Platform - Part 1 - Series Overview

Overview: Microsoft have great capabilities for logging and monitoring.  In this series of posts I will be examining the various parts of logging that may be useful in building solutions that are well monitored, provide alerting, easy tracing, and identifies issues or potential issues as soon as possible.

I am looking at App Insights for Power Platform monitoring.  So this includes: 

• Power Apps (Canvas, and model apps),
• Power Automate,
• APIM, 
• Azure Functions, 
• Azure Service Bus, and
• App Insights.

I shall be setting up a demo environment and these are the logical components being covered.

All the components making up the solution shall log into Log Analytics (left-hand side of the diagram).

For Continuous Integration, my clients will be Postman monitor (it's awesome and so easy to use all those postman collections), DevOps is great and I'll use it to run smoke tests after new releases.  I also use flows, to report on flows (sounds nuts but i love it).  These are at the bottom of the diagram. 

Lastly on the right of the diagram, I look at extracting logs for reporting (Power BI), and Monitoring using Azure DevOps (p.s. think about Grafana instead of DevOps Dashboards, it so nice).

Couple of extras are: Availability Logging, alerting, automating Canvas app testing, Playwright.  

From the diagram, you can see the data is now held in Log analytics and it can be queried via Log Analytics or App Insights using Kusto.  Note: the syntax is slightly different.

Series

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 1 - Series Overview (this post)

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 2 - App Insights and Azure Log Analytics 

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 3 - Canvas App Logging (Instrumentation key)

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 4 - Model App Logging

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 5 - Logging for APIM (this post)

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 6 - Power Automate Logging

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 7 - Monitoring Azure Dashboards 

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 8 - Verify logging is going to the correct Log analytics

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 9 - Power automate licencing

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 10 - Custom Connector enable logging

App Insights for Power Platform - Part 11 - Custom Connector Behaviour from Canvas Apps Concern

Tip: The Power Platform Admin Centre has a good overview of the Power Platform, but to make logging and monitoring better push data into Azure Log analytics and monitor and alert centrally.

Also see: View and download Dataverse analytics - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Common Azure Services

Azure Key Vault - Secure config storage and retrieval

There are SDK's for working with Azure Key Vault such as the "Azure Key Vault secret client library for .NET (SDK v4)".  Extremely easy to get secrets from the secure vault using C#.

Azure Storage

Create a Service SAS for a Blob storage container

Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is a great tool for reviewing your Azure Storage and in the case below I used it to add some Azure table storage for a demo customer list.

There is also a web edition of Storage explorer that is in preview as of 18 Nov 2020.

App Service - Host Web sites or WebAPI

Azure Artifacts - Code and share your packages via NuGet, and npm packages with Azure Artifacts for more reliable and scalable builds

Azure Data Factory (ADF) - Basically PaaS fully managed Azure ETL/SSIS.  Many connectors to ingest data.  Send to Azure Synapse Analytics.

Azure Big Data

Azure Synapse Analytics  - is a managed PaaS solution that brings together ADF, Data Lakes (both Storage and Analyse) and Azure Data Warehouse under single managed solution.  Easier than the individual pieces and scales as you need with almost unlimited capability.  Azure Purview - discover and analyses all your data, integrates with AIP.  Azure Synapses simplified analytics, sold as a PaaS (Serverless) or dedicated.  Easiest way to draw data out of Azure Synapse is Power BI.  Easy to bring data into Azure Synapse from CosmosDB and SQL databases (no affect on performance) can automatically push the data into Synapse, no need for ADF. And the data is in live time.

Azure Application Configuration - Feature Toggles/Feature flags are extremely useful in code.  This service is great for turning on experimental features, operation feature, environment/release features, and security features.  Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags) (martinfowler.com)  Use for feature flags whereas KeyVault is for secrets.

Azure Resource Explorer - Documentation on Azure API's and ability to call the APIs.

Azure Policy - Azure Policy Templates can be custom created that apply rules to your subscription.  There are a lot out of pre-canned policies.  You can enforce naming conventions, tagging standards, enforce deployment of resources into specific regions, ....