Quickstart: Monitoring Azure Spring Apps apps with logs, metrics, and tracing

Note

Azure Spring Apps is the new name for the Azure Spring Cloud service. Although the service has a new name, you'll see the old name in some places for a while as we work to update assets such as screenshots, videos, and diagrams.

This article applies to: ✔️ Basic/Standard tier ❌ Enterprise tier

With the built-in monitoring capability in Azure Spring Apps, you can debug and monitor complex issues. Azure Spring Apps 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:

  • Provision Azure Spring Apps service.
  • Set up Azure Spring Apps configuration server.
  • Build and deploy apps.
  • Set up Log Analytics workspace.

Logs

There are two ways to see logs on Azure Spring Apps: 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 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 app logs -h to explore more parameters and log stream functionality.

Log Analytics

1. 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 Apps.

   

2. Edit the query to remove the Where clauses that limit the display to warning and error logs.

3. Then select Run, and you will see logs. See Azure Log Analytics docs for more guidance on writing queries.

   

4. 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

1. 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 Avg for Aggregation to see the timeline for that metric.

   

2. Select Add filter in the toolbar, select App=solar-system-weather to see CPU usage only for the solar-system-weather app.

   

3. Dismiss the filter created in the preceding step, select Apply Splitting, and select App for Values to see CPU usage by different apps.

   

Distributed tracing

1. 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.

   

2. You can now see the status of calls between apps.

   

3. Select the link between solar-system-weather and planet-weather-provider to see more details like slowest calls by HTTP methods.

   

4. Finally, select Investigate Performance to explore more powerful built-in performance analysis.

   

With the built-in monitoring capability in Azure Spring Apps, you can debug and monitor complex issues. Azure Spring Apps 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 Apps
• Set up the config server. For enterprise tier, please follow set up Application Configuration Service.
• Build and deploy apps.
• Set up Log Analytics workspace.

Logs

There are two ways to see logs on Azure Spring Apps: Log Streaming of real-time logs per app instance or Log Analytics for aggregated logs with advanced query capability.

Log streaming

CLI

You can use log streaming in the Azure CLI with the following command.

az spring app logs -s <service instance name> -g <resource group name> -n gateway -f

You will see logs like this:

Tip

Use az spring 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.

IntelliJ

To get the logs using Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ:

1. Select Azure Explorer, then Spring Cloud.

2. Right-click the running app.

3. Select Streaming Logs from the drop-down list.

   

4. Select Instance.

   

5. The streaming log will be visible in the output window.

   

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

1. Go to the service | Overview page and select Logs in the Monitoring section. Select Run on one of the sample queries for Azure Spring Apps.

   

2. 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 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-service application has the following custom metrics enabled:
  • @Timed: petclinic.owner
  • @Timed: petclinic.pet
• visits-service application has the following custom metrics enabled:
  • @Timed: petclinic.visit

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 Apps and start monitoring Spring 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

If you plan to continue working with subsequent quickstarts and tutorials, you might want to leave these resources in place. When no longer needed, delete the resource group, which deletes the resources in the resource group. To delete the resource group by using Azure CLI, use the following commands:

echo "Enter the Resource Group name:" &&
read resourceGroupName &&
az group delete --name $resourceGroupName &&
echo "Press [ENTER] to continue ..."

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 Apps, see:

Analyze logs and metrics with diagnostics settings> Stream Azure Spring Apps app logs in real-time