CorrelationId thoughts for improved logging in SPAs

Problem:  Single Page Applications (SPA) generate a new correlationId/guid on path changes only, when logging to something like App Insights, the SPA using a framework like Angular will have a page view with multiple actions that are logged using the same guid.  

Initial Hypothesis: You can work out the users journey by using the page view guid and tracing the actions to drill down to the issue.  It is far easier to generate a new guid for each action making error tracing simpler/faster for 1st line support.  Also performance issues are far easier to replicate and automate reporting on for changes in performance.   

SPA/Angular Resolution:

1. import { Injectable } from '@angular/core'; 

2. import { ApplicationInsights } from '@microsoft/applicationinsights-web'; 

3. import { environment } from 'src/environments/environment'; 

4.  

5. @Injectable({ 

6.   providedIn: 'root' 

7. }) 

8. export class AppinsightsLoggingService { 

9.   appInsights: ApplicationInsights; 

10.   constructor() { 

11.     this.appInsights = new ApplicationInsights({ 

12.       config: { 

13.         instrumentationKey: environment.appInsights.instrumentationKey, 

14.         enableRequestHeaderTracking: true, 

15.         enableCorsCorrelation: true, 

16.         loggingLevelTelemetry: 1, 

17.         enableAutoRouteTracking: true // option to log route changes 

18.       } 

19.     }); 

20.     this.appInsights.loadAppInsights(); 

21.     this.appInsights.trackPageView(); 

22.   } 

23.  

24.   logPageView(name?: string, url?: string) { // option to call manually 

25.     alert(name); 

26.     this.appInsights.trackPageView({ 

27.       name: name, 

28.       uri: url 

29.     }); 

30.   } 

47. } 

48. 
    

1.  public  getTraceId (){ 

2.     return this.appInsights.context.telemetryTrace.traceID; 

3.   } 

4. // Call when needed

Note: Thanks to Pravesh Chourasia for showing me how to do this.

Azure DevOps Series - Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines are good at deploying solutions by setting up the infrastructure (I prefer to use PaaS and get out of the Infrastructure world, using ARM templates) and deploying code with the appropriate DTAP environment configuration.  Azure Test Plans are used to verify builds. 

Overview: DevOps allows for shorter duration periods to deploy code into production.  Some industries still require a high amount controlled environment code changes, think medical systems.  In the PaaS world with DevOps pipelines automation of code and verification is drastically reduced.

It's key to figure out your DTAP deployment strategy.  I outline a mixture of an old school deployment strategy with a PaaS DevOps model that is fairly risk adverse below:

This PaaS approach requires three types of pipelines:

1. PaaS Infrastructure - One-offs and updates
2. Build/App Deployments
3. Database data or Schema (Bounded Context) updates 

Build agents

The instructions from Azure pipelines requires agents to run the instructions.  The easiest is to use MS host pipelines/agents.  If you need more power or software, use self hosted agents, these can be on VM's or hosted in docker containers.  It's a good idea to ensure the build agents are running the latest version as it doesn't change often. Self host if you need to run software that is not part of the MS hosted agent set.  V3 of the agent is excellent, try use this first until you outgrow it, or have specific timing concerns.

Azure DevOps Series Posts:

1. Azure DevOps Series - Overview 
2. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards 
3. Missing
4. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Pipelines (This Post)
5. Azure DevOps Series - DevSecOps

Pendo Introduction - Track user interaction

Overview: Pendo tracks usage and has a help/html wizard to help users work on your application via product analytics.  

Info: Pendo can be implemented using Google Tag Manager.

Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards

Azure Boards are used for managing software projects.  Regardless of the approach Azure Boards support multiple frameworks and integrate well with tooling such as Visual Studio as you IDE.  Microsoft strap line for Azure Boards is "Plan, track and discuss work across your teams".

You need to login to Azure DevOps and Create an Organisation, in the image below I have two organisation.  

Next I need to create a new project, the image below shows the options.  For Source Control most teams and people choose Git, I came from TFS which is now Team Foundation Version Control and before that Visual Source Safe with various other version control systems but Git is now far more widely used.  I have chosen to make my project "Private".  Lastly, I need to select the Work Item Process.  I prefer to use the "Agile" process templates for Scrum and not the Scrum Templates as I prefer to use User Stories over Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in my Backlog.  I follow the hierarchy Epic, Feature, User Story, Task.  And the "Agile" Template gives the correct naming and board in DevOps.  

Go to "Project Setting" > "Project Configuration" and update the iterations to match your sprint dates as shown below.

Add a new Epic (Top level Item)

There is a little configuration to get your queries and boards setup correctly.

Azure DevOps Series Posts:

1. Azure DevOps Series - Overview
2. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards (This Post)
3. Missing
4. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Pipelines
5. Azure DevOps Series - DevSecOps

App Insights Overview for SaaS logging and tracing

Overview:  App Insights provides independent infrastructure for logging and tracing activities.  It is tightly coupled with Azure services including PaaS.  This allows for consistent scalable logging.  App Insights now stores logs in Azure Log Analytics, these are all under the umbrella of Azure Monitor, 

On a SaaS solution, I am looking for App Insights to log any errors have the ability to log trace information.  I want a unique correlationId (to allow for distributed tracing) on the front end if there is an error so support can identify the exact issue/transactions.  A unique correlationId in the http header allows for identifying a transaction and this is useful for tracing and performance monitoring.  Using the App Insights SDK's and implementing a common logging module is a good idea.  There are two common areas that need call out to ensure the ability to trace transactions:

1. SPA's (Requirement to generate a unique operation/correlationId per operation not per pageview), and
2. Long running operation such as timer jobs or service bus calls.

Support & DevOps:

Having a correlationId allows first line to log the correlationId and quickly follow the request without asking for replication steps.  This context tracing approach is common on newer applications. Third line support has full traceability of an issue to support who can empirically see the perceived performance parts broken down using the correlationId in the header.

Key API's can be continuously monitored for errors and slow down in performance, alerts can be configured around this monitoring. 

Building a first line support tool that displays the errors in a hierarchy, has help scripts and knowledge bases is a good option for streamlining support.

App Insights has live monitoring and also has Kusto query language is useful for monitoring specific queries.

Summary Report for Support

// I'm sure there are nicer ways to write/improve my Kusto, so pls let me let me know where the code can be improved

let dayminus0 = datetime(now);

let dayminus1 = ago(24h);

let dayminus2 = ago(48h);

let result0 = requests

    | where timestamp > dayminus1 and timestamp < dayminus0

    | summarize requestCount=sum(itemCount), avgDuration=avg(duration) by performanceBucket

    | where performanceBucket == "15sec-30sec" or performanceBucket == "7sec-15sec"

        or performanceBucket == "30sec-1-min" or performanceBucket == "1min-2min";

let dayminus1a = ago(24h);

let dayminus2a = ago(48h);

let result1 = requests

    | where timestamp > dayminus2a and timestamp < dayminus1a

    | summarize requestCount1=sum(itemCount), avgDuration1=avg(duration) by performanceBucket

    | where performanceBucket == "15sec-30sec" or performanceBucket == "7sec-15sec"

        or performanceBucket == "30sec-1-min" or performanceBucket == "1min-2min";

let dayminus1b = ago(2d);

let dayminus2b = ago(3d);

let result2 = requests

    | where timestamp > dayminus2b and timestamp < dayminus1b

    | summarize requestCount2=sum(itemCount), avgDuration2=avg(duration) by performanceBucket

    | where performanceBucket == "15sec-30sec" or performanceBucket == "7sec-15sec"

        or performanceBucket == "30sec-1-min" or performanceBucket == "1min-2min";

let resultTemp = result0

    | join kind=inner result1 on performanceBucket 

    | project performanceBucket, ['Today'] = avgDuration, ['Yesterday'] = avgDuration1;

let resultTemp2 = resultTemp;

resultTemp2

| join kind=inner result2 on performanceBucket 

| project

    performanceBucket,

    ['1) Today']= (round(['Today'], -2) / 1000),

    ['2) Yesterday'] = (round(['Yesterday'], -2) / 1000),

    ['3) Two Day ago'] = (round(avgDuration2, -2) / 1000) 

| render columnchart

    with (

    kind=unstacked,

    ytitle="Seconds Taken",

    xtitle="Performance Group",

    title="Ensure the 'Today' bar is not significantly higher than pervious days");

Monitoring:  Azure dashboards are great for monitoring application health and performance.  Easy to customise, make unique dashboards and security is easy to control.  sentry.io monitors API's, I have not used it.  I like all the Azure stuff coming out for testing and I feel continuously running Postman collections and reporting to App Insights is the best way to go.  Azure Dashboards can be limiting, Azure Grafana can be a great alternative/enhancement.  Check out Azure Managed Grafana.

source cloudiqtech

Alerting: I all to often see an overuse of alerting resulting in recipients ignoring a plethora of emails.  I believe in minimising alerts especially via email, and SMS type messaging.  For me, I like to create a dedicate channel for alerting that includes all DevOps members and either notify via a Teams card, and even easier is to email the channel.  This can be broken down further but to start I create a channel for alerting for each DTAP environment.

Note: The default channel setup only allows members of the teams channel to send email so the alerts from Azure monitor using rules won't be accepted.  On the channel, and admin needs to go to the "advance settings" and change the option from "Only members of this Team" and change it the setting to "Anyone can send".

Options:  There are great services for logging so my default tends to be Azure Monitor.  The main players in Application & API observability and monitoring include: 

• Microsoft: Azure Monitor includes Application Insights & Azure Log Analytics
• Dynatrace (really good if you use multicloud) or Dynatrace AWS cloudwatch,  Dynatrace - Saas offering is on AWS.  Can be on-prem.  OneAgent is deployed on the Compute i.e. VM, Kubernetes.  Can import logs from other SIEMs or Azure Monitor, so you can eventually get Azure service logs such as App Service or Service Bus.  Does Full stack and includes code-level and applications and infrastructure monitoring, also can show User monitoring.  Dynatrace offers scalable API's that are sitting on Kubernetes.  "Davis" is the AI engine used to help figure out the problems.  Alerting is solid.  

High-level Architecture

Dynatrace Admin Monitoring

• AWS: Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics
• AppDynamics,
• Datadog (excellent),
• New Relic,
• SolarWinds (excellent)

SolarWinds admin UI from circa 2013/2014 

Dynatrace

Azure DevOps Series - Overview

Azure DevOps is a SaaS platform that provides tools for deploying software using DevOps techniques generally within Agile software delivery projects.  DevOps is useful for gathering requirements, building the solution, performing daily “integration builds”, and having deliverable end-of-sprint demos.  The key to building software today versus several years ago is that we should automate as much as possible.  Azure DevOps provides excellent tooling to automate and implement automation results in better quality, reduced timelines.  Building software is easy as long as you have great people and precise requirements.  Agile practices and DevOps processes and tooling can help get you to the desired state.

1. Azure Boards are great for planning and getting the requirements cleanly broken down.
2. Visual Studio coupled with Azure boards items with Azure Repos (source control options are GitHub & TFVS) is ideal for the development using most languages such as C#, NodesJS, Angular, React, TypeScript.
3. Azure Pipelines are good at deploying solutions by setting up the infrastructure (I prefer to use PaaS and get out of the Infrastructure world, using ARM templates) and deploying code with the appropriate DTAP environment configuration.  Azure Test Plans are used to verify builds. 
4. Monitor and Alert – Azure Monitor/App Insights is ideal for monitoring the infrastructure and operating code to detect issues early.
5. Azure Artifacts help create and share Nuget code packages.

More Info:

https://www.pbeck.co.uk/2021/07/azure-devops-user-storing-tips.html

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-dotnet-webapp

Azure DevOps Series Posts:

1. Azure DevOps Series - Overview (This Post)
2. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards 
3. Missing
4. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Pipelines
5. Azure DevOps Series - DevSecOps