Quickstart: Monitoring Azure Spring Cloud apps with logs, metrics, and tracing
With the built-in monitoring capability in Azure Spring Cloud, you can debug and monitor complex issues. Azure Spring Cloud integrates Steeltoe distributed tracing with Azure's Application Insights. This integration provides powerful logs, metrics, and distributed tracing capability from the Azure portal.
The following procedures explain how to use Log Streaming, Log Analytics, Metrics, and Distributed Tracing with the sample app that you deployed in the preceding quickstarts.
Prerequisites
Complete the previous quickstarts in this series:
Logs
There are two ways to see logs on Azure Spring Cloud: Log Streaming of real-time logs per app instance or Log Analytics for aggregated logs with advanced query capability.
Log streaming
You can use log streaming in the Azure CLI with the following command.
az spring-cloud app logs -n solar-system-weather -f
You will see output similar to the following example:
=> ConnectionId:0HM2HOMHT82UK => RequestPath:/weatherforecast RequestId:0HM2HOMHT82UK:00000003, SpanId:|e8c1682e-46518cc0202c5fd9., TraceId:e8c1682e-46518cc0202c5fd9, ParentId: => Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather.Controllers.WeatherForecastController.Get (Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather)
Executing action method Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather.Controllers.WeatherForecastController.Get (Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather) - Validation state: Valid
←[40m←[32minfo←[39m←[22m←[49m: Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather.Controllers.WeatherForecastController[0]
=> ConnectionId:0HM2HOMHT82UK => RequestPath:/weatherforecast RequestId:0HM2HOMHT82UK:00000003, SpanId:|e8c1682e-46518cc0202c5fd9., TraceId:e8c1682e-46518cc0202c5fd9, ParentId: => Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather.Controllers.WeatherForecastController.Get (Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather)
Retrieved weather data from 4 planets
←[40m←[32minfo←[39m←[22m←[49m: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Infrastructure.ControllerActionInvoker[2]
=> ConnectionId:0HM2HOMHT82UK => RequestPath:/weatherforecast RequestId:0HM2HOMHT82UK:00000003, SpanId:|e8c1682e-46518cc0202c5fd9., TraceId:e8c1682e-46518cc0202c5fd9, ParentId: => Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather.Controllers.WeatherForecastController.Get (Microsoft.Azure.SpringCloud.Sample.SolarSystemWeather)
Executing ObjectResult, writing value of type 'System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair`2[[System.String, System.Private.CoreLib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e],[System.String, System.Private.CoreLib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e]][]'.
←[40m←[32minfo←[39m←[22m←[49m: Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Infrastructure.ControllerActionInvoker[2]
Tip
Use az spring-cloud app logs -h to explore more parameters and log stream functionality.
Log Analytics
In the Azure portal, go to the service | Overview page and select Logs in the Monitoring section. Select Run on one of the sample queries for Azure Spring Cloud.
Edit the query to remove the Where clauses that limit the display to warning and error logs.
Then select
Run, and you will see logs. See Azure Log Analytics docs for more guidance on writing queries.To learn more about the query language that's used in Log Analytics, see Azure Monitor log queries. To query all your Log Analytics logs from a centralized client, check out Azure Data Explorer.
Metrics
In the Azure portal, go to the service | Overview page and select Metrics in the Monitoring section. Add your first metric by selecting one of the .NET metrics under Performance (.NET) or Request (.NET) in the Metric drop-down, and
Avgfor Aggregation to see the timeline for that metric.Select Add filter in the toolbar, select
App=solar-system-weatherto see CPU usage only for the solar-system-weather app.Dismiss the filter created in the preceding step, select Apply Splitting, and select
Appfor Values to see CPU usage by different apps.
Distributed tracing
In the Azure portal, go to the service | Overview page and select Distributed tracing in the Monitoring section. Then select the View application map tab on the right.
You can now see the status of calls between apps.
Select the link between solar-system-weather and planet-weather-provider to see more details like slowest calls by HTTP methods.
Finally, select Investigate Performance to explore more powerful built-in performance analysis.
With the built-in monitoring capability in Azure Spring Cloud, you can debug and monitor complex issues. Azure Spring Cloud integrates Spring Cloud Sleuth with Azure's Application Insights. This integration provides powerful logs, metrics, and distributed tracing capability from the Azure portal. The following procedures explain how to use Log Streaming, Log Analytics, Metrics, and Distributed tracing with deployed PetClinic apps.
Prerequisites
Complete previous steps:
- Provision an instance of Azure Spring Cloud
- Set up the config server
- Build and deploy apps.
- Set up Log Analytics workspace.
Logs
There are two ways to see logs on Azure Spring Cloud: Log Streaming of real-time logs per app instance or Log Analytics for aggregated logs with advanced query capability.
Log streaming
You can use log streaming in the Azure CLI with the following command.
az spring-cloud app logs -s <service instance name> -g <resource group name> -n gateway -f
You will see logs like this:
Tip
Use az spring-cloud app logs -h to explore more parameters and log stream functionalities.
To learn more about the query language that's used in Log Analytics, see Azure Monitor log queries. To query all your Log Analytics logs from a centralized client, check out Azure Data Explorer.
Log Analytics
Go to the service | Overview page and select Logs in the Monitoring section. Select Run on one of the sample queries for Azure Spring Cloud.
Then you will see filtered logs. See Azure Log Analytics docs for more guidance on writing queries.
Metrics
Navigate to the Application insights blade. Then, navigate to the Metrics blade - you can see metrics contributed by Spring Boot apps,
Spring Cloud modules, and dependencies.
The chart below shows gateway-requests (Spring Cloud Gateway), hikaricp_connections
(JDBC Connections) and http_client_requests.
Spring Boot registers a lot number of core metrics: JVM, CPU, Tomcat, Logback...
The Spring Boot auto-configuration enables the instrumentation of requests handled by Spring MVC.
All those three REST controllers OwnerResource, PetResource and VisitResource have been instrumented by the @Timed Micrometer annotation at class level.
customers-serviceapplication has the following custom metrics enabled:- @Timed:
petclinic.owner - @Timed:
petclinic.pet
- @Timed:
visits-serviceapplication has the following custom metrics enabled:- @Timed:
petclinic.visit
- @Timed:
You can see these custom metrics in the Metrics blade:
You can use the Availability Test feature in Application Insights and monitor the availability of applications:
Navigate to the Live Metrics blade - you can see live metrics on screen with low latencies < 1 second:
Tracing
Open the Application Insights created by Azure Spring Cloud and start monitoring microservice applications.
Navigate to the Application Map blade:
Navigate to the Performance blade:
Navigate to the Performance/Dependenices blade - you can see the performance number for dependencies, particularly SQL calls:
Select a SQL call to see the end-to-end transaction in context:
Navigate to the Failures/Exceptions blade - you can see a collection of exceptions:
Select an exception to see the end-to-end transaction and stacktrace in context:
Clean up resources
In these quickstarts, you created Azure resources that will continue to accrue charges if they remain in your subscription. If you don't expect to need these resources in the future, delete the resource group by using the portal or by running the following command in the Cloud Shell:
az group delete --name <your resource group name; for example: helloworld-1558400876966-rg> --yes
In an earlier quickstart, you also set the default resource group name. If you don't intend to continue to the next quickstart, clear out that default by running the following CLI command:
az config set defaults.group=
Next steps
To explore more monitoring capabilities of Azure Spring Cloud, see:


