Common scenarios, examples, tutorials, and walkthroughs for Azure Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps helps you orchestrate and integrate different services by providing hundreds of ready-to-use connectors, ranging from SQL Server or SAP to Azure Cognitive Services. The Logic Apps service is "serverless", so you don't have to worry about scale or instances. All you have to do is define the workflow with a trigger and the actions that the workflow performs. The underlying platform handles scale, availability, and performance. Logic Apps is especially useful for use cases and scenarios where you need to coordinate actions across multiple systems and services.

To help you learn about the capabilities and patterns that Azure Logic Apps supports, this article describes common starting points, examples, and scenarios.

Common starting points for logic app workflows

Every logic app starts with a trigger, and only one trigger, which starts your logic app workflow and passes in any data as part of that trigger. Some connectors provide triggers, which come in these types:

  • Polling triggers: Regularly checks a service endpoint for new data. When new data exists, the trigger creates and runs a new workflow instance with the data as input.

  • Push triggers: Listens for data at a service endpoint and waits until a specific event happens. When the event happens, the trigger fires immediately, creating and running a new workflow instance that uses any available data as input.

Here are examples that describe commonly-used triggers:

After the specified event happens, the trigger fires, which creates a new logic app workflow instance and runs the actions in the workflow. You can access any data from the trigger throughout the workflow. For example, the Twitter On a new tweet trigger passes the tweet content into the logic app run. To get started with Azure Logic Apps, try these quickstart topics:

Control flow and error handling capabilities

Logic apps include rich capabilities for advanced control flow, such as conditions, switches, loops, and scopes. To ensure resilient solutions, you can also implement error and exception handling in your workflows.

Create custom APIs and connectors

For systems and services that don't have published connectors, you can also extend logic apps.

Build business-to-business (B2B) solutions

For enterprise integration solutions and seamless communication between organizations, you can build automated scalable workflows for these scenarios by using the Enterprise Integration Pack (EIP) with Azure Logic Apps. Although organizations use different protocols and formats, they can exchange messages electronically. The EIP transforms different formats into a format that your organizations' systems can process and supports industry-standard protocols, including AS2, X12, EDIFACT, and RosettaNet. To build these solutions, you create an integration account, which is a separate Azure resource that provides a secure, scalable, and manageable container for the artifacts that you define and use with your logic app workflows. For example, artifacts include trading partners, agreements, maps, schemas, certificates, and batch configurations.

Access Azure virtual network resources

Sometimes, your logic apps and integration accounts need access to secured resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) and other systems or services, that are in an Azure virtual network. To set up this access, you can create an integration service environment (ISE) where you can build and run your logic apps. An ISE is a private and isolated instance of the Logic Apps service that uses dedicated resources such as storage, and runs separately from the public, "global", multi-tenant Logic Apps service. Separating your isolated private instance and the public global instance also helps reduce the impact that other Azure tenants might have on your apps' performance, which is also known as the "noisy neighbors" effect.

Deploy, manage, and monitor logic apps

You can fully develop and deploy logic apps with Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, or any other source control and automated build tools. To support deployment for workflows and dependent connections in a resource template, logic apps use Azure resource deployment templates. Visual Studio tools automatically generate these templates, which you can check in to source control for versioning. For notification and diagnostic logs for workflow run status, Azure Logic Apps also provides monitoring and alerts.

Deploy

Manage

Monitor

Handle content types, conversions, and transformations

You can access, convert, and transform multiple content types by using the many functions in the Azure Logic Apps workflow definition language. For example, you can convert between a string, JSON, and XML with the @json() and @xml() workflow expressions. The Logic Apps engine preserves content types to support content transfer in a lossless manner between services.

Other integrations and capabilities

Azure Logic Apps integrates with many services, such as Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure App Service, and custom HTTP endpoints, for example, REST and SOAP.

End-to-end scenarios

Customer stories

Learn how Azure Logic Apps, along with other Azure services and Microsoft products, helped these companies improve their agility and focus on their core businesses by simplifying, organizing, automating, and orchestrating complex processes.

Next steps