Read this comprehensive review of Serverless360 to install, configure, and use the features of this Azure monitoring and management tool:
Azure Monitoring Tools play a critical role in all the forums i.e. from small businesses to large businesses. It helps in keeping an eye on various components that are integrated into business applications and understanding whether they are functioning as expected or not.
While choosing the Azure Monitoring and Management Tool, it is important to determine your requirement and decide the type of monitoring tool for your Azure Applications.
If it is about knowing the performance of the applications and analyzing if it is meeting your SLA and the experience for users is as expected then it can be achieved by the APM products available in the market.
Also Read => Active Directory Tutorial – Learn What Is Active Directory
If Azure resources like Service Bus, Logic Apps, Functions, API Management, etc. run your application at the core and that is the only part being provisioned and exposed to you in the Serverless world then holistic monitoring of your siloed Azure resources can be performed by the Azure Monitoring tools like Serverless360.
Serverless360 will help you with finding errors in your Azure resources and improve the efficiency of your operations. It will support your team with resolving issues and that too without involving developers.
APM products can’t provide you with such resource-level monitoring. There are no tools available in the market that have capabilities like Serverless360 to perform end-to-end tracking on integration between Microsoft Azure resources. It will let you monitor the transactions, flow of messages at different stages of application integration.
What You Will Learn:
What Is Serverless360
Serverless360 is an Azure Serverless Monitoring and Management platform. It can monitor your complete serverless integration solutions.
Azure Portal is specially designed for vertical technology silos but the real-time scenario involves the integrated cloud applications that require at least 3 to 4 different Azure services. They are not always built in a single technology stack and hence it gets difficult to visualize and manage such connected solutions with Azure Portal.
Serverless360 is a tool that will help you to manage and monitor all your distributed Azure services in one place.
Serverless360 can solve the challenges faced by businesses while working with Azure portal and resources, such as no application visibility, no integrated tooling, no consolidated monitoring, message processing, no auditing, no application-level security, etc.
Serverless360 Installation Process
It is recommended to check the pre-requisites first to successfully install Serverless360.
Serverless360 Prerequisites
Hardware Requirements
Installation of Serverless360 requires the following hardware requirements:
- Computer & Processor: Serverless360 requires a computer that has a CPU compatible with Intel Pentium that is 1GHz or higher for single processors, 900MHz or higher for double processors, 700 MHz or higher for quad processors.
- Hard-Disk (Database): Hard Disk should be NTFS formatted. There should a 20GB of hard disk space available for a complete installation including the OS and all the pre-requisite software.
- Memory: 8GB or higher.
Software Requirements
To install and run Serverless360 your system must have the below software:
- Operating System: Windows (7, 8, 8.1, 10), Windows Server (2012, 2012 R2, & 2016).
- Microsoft.NET Framework: For the Azure Services to function smoothly, you should have Microsoft.Net Framework 4.5.
- Internet Information Services: IIS 7.0 or above
- SQL Server: SQL Server 2012 or above (Local or Azure SQL)
- General: You will require administrative rights to run MSI from the Admin command prompt and ASP.NET registered.
- Other Modules: URL Rewrite extension will be required for IIS.
MSI installer can detect pre-requisites. If any component is missing then the installer will not allow you to continue.
How To Install And Configure Serverless360
You can follow the below procedure to install and configure Serverless360 in a virtual machine.
Step 1: Open the “Command Prompt” in your server machine.
Step 2: Navigate to the MSI file location and execute it. You will have to run the MSI from the Administrator Command Prompt.
Step 3: Click on the “Next” button of the Welcome to Serverless360 Setup Wizard.
Step 4: Next step is to read the End User License Agreement and check the checkbox “I accept the terms in the License Agreement”. Once this checkbox is selected you can click on the “Next” button.
Step 5: You will see the below screen. The Custom Setup screen will allow you to choose a valid location to save Serverless360 on the computer.
While doing this please ensure that you can change the Website and Windows service component information as well. Then you can click on the “Next” button that will lead you to the next step that is the Final installation verification step.
Step 6: Now you will get the below screen i.e. “Prerequisite Check Screen”. On this screen, you just have to verify whether all the prerequisites are verified and there is a green tick mark for every item. You will have to cancel the setup in case something is wrong. You can click the “Next” button to proceed.
Step 7: The next step is of creating Serverless360 Database and for that, you will have to specify the SQL Server name and Database name. (As a best practice, Serverless360 recommends leaving this section with the default values)
Serverless360 can be installed with the Azure SQL database. If you don’t want to use Windows Authentication in the database and for the Azure SQL database, you can choose SQL Server Authentication. Click the “Next” button and proceed to the next step.
Step 8: Next is the IIS Virtual Directory setting page as shown below. First, you have to select the IIS website where you want to create the virtual directory. Here you need to enter application pool settings such as Name, username, and password and then click the “Next” button to proceed. Here you have to ensure that the user is a part of local groups.
Step 9: You will get the below screen. You can review the information here and click the “Install” button.
The installation process will start and get completed in 1-2 minutes.
Step 10: Click on the “Finish” button to complete the procedure.
This completes the installation and you can access the Serverless360 at http://<yourVMName>/Serverless360
How To Use Serverless360 Features
#1) Application Visibility
The dashboard will provide a view of all your serverless applications in one place. Here is the composite application dashboard of Serverless360. In this image, you can see the composite applications defined to represent the business solution. Serverless360 has an intuitive UI.
Serverless360 will allow you to add resources from different Azure subscriptions and regions into composite applications. You can view them here on the dashboard with the business solutions they are solving.
In the above image, you can see an intuitive graph that will tell you the current status of the application. In case of any errors (as highlighted in the below image), you will get them right there in the composite application by clicking the “Manage” button.
You will get the details on which particular resources are having an error by clicking on the “Summary” as shown in the below image:
The below image will show you the details that you will get after clicking the “Summary”. Here you can identify the monitors for which you are getting an error.
#2) Consolidated Monitoring
Serverless360 provides the feature of consolidated monitoring. It has Status Monitor, Data Monitor, Threshold Monitor, and Watch Monitor.
Status Monitor: If your business solution is using Azure serverless components like Service Bus Queues, Logic Apps, and Function Apps and your monitoring requirement is to get the status update on all the resources at every one-hour interval.
You want to share the status report with the team members over Slack then Serverless360 has the solution of Status Monitor.
Configuring a Status Monitor:
Creating/Editing the Status Monitor: A status Monitor is present in every Composite Application created. Serverless360 will allow you to create any number of status monitors as per your requirement.
Defining the Status Monitor: You can edit the status monitor configuration and define the frequency to generate the status report. You can even configure the status report to get alerts only if there is any violation. You can refer to the below image for the Edit option.
You can define the notification channels for the status monitors so that the alerts will get shared. Notification channels can be turned on from the list of configured channels through which the status monitor is expected to send an alert.
The below image will show you the Notification Channel screen. [Click the Edit option as shown in the above image>>Click Next button>>Click Next Button>>you will get Notification channel screen]
Serverless360 will allow you to associate multiple resources to a single status monitor. It can monitor the following Azure resources on their state, metric/properties.
- Service Bus Queues/ Topics/ Topic Subscriptions
- Relays
- Event Hubs
- Logic Apps
- Function Apps
- Storage Queues/Blobs/Files
- API Endpoint
You can configure threshold values on resource properties: Serverless360 allows you to define an expected state against the current state of the associated resources. Hence the resources can be monitored on the value of their properties and metrics.
Given below is the step-by-step explanation to configure the warning and error threshold values on the metrics or properties of the associated resources. This will generate an appropriate warning or error monitoring status.
Step 1: Choose the Monitor i.e. “Status Monitor”.
Step 2: Select the associated resources.
Step 3: Select the option as per your requirement and click the “Next” button as shown in the below image.
Step 4: In this step you need to enable the Status property>> then enable the property>>Update the values of Warning Threshold and Error Threshold>> click Save Button.
After clicking the Save button you will get the below screen.
Threshold Monitor: Serverless360 offers the Threshold Monitor that will help you to meet your business requirement. We will see the configuration of the Threshold monitor, auto-correction of the State-based monitor, alert settings, etc.
A Threshold Monitor will be present in every Composite Application. Serverless360 will allow you to create as many threshold monitors as you want.
You can edit the threshold monitor configuration and define the violation tolerance duration as shown below.
You can define the number of alerts to receive in case of violation.
Serverless360 will allow you to specify the days of the week to execute the monitor.
If you enable the option “Notify On Success” then the system will alert you on the recovery of the violation.
You can define the notification channel where you want to receive the threshold monitor alerts. You just need to turn on that notification channel as shown in the below image.
Serverless360 will allow you to associate multiple resources to a single threshold monitor. You can configure threshold values on resource properties.
Thus you can monitor the resource on the value of their properties and metrics as shown in the below images.
Configuring Properties
The below images will show you an alert message sent by the Threshold Monitor.
#3) Deep Integrated Tooling
We will take an example of an order processing scenario to understand this deep scenario.
There is a website for customers. Customers can submit an order. When an order is placed by a customer, a new service bus message is pushed into the service bus queue. There is a logic app that picks the message from the queue for processing.
The azure function will validate the order and return the status to Service Bus Topic. In this topic, there is a Topic Subscription rule that is defined to handle messages according to status value.
The below image will help you to understand the scenario.
Azure developers have some challenges to complete this solution in Azure Portal. One challenge is defining topic subscription rules. This can’t be achieved through a portal. Serverless360 has this capability and will help you with such scenarios.
When you associate a resource with a composite application, then, managing and monitoring resources will be easier. The Service Bus queue is shown in the below image. There is a list of management capabilities that you can perform on them.
Few more Key Capabilities
Key Capability 1: Defining Topic Subscription Rule
How can Topic Subscription Rules be defined in Serverless360?
Click on the topic as shown in the below image.
There are some subscriptions for the topic as shown in the below image.
Click as shown in the below image and you need to select “Rules” as shown below.
Here you can define the correlation filters like –> If the label is accepted only then it will accept the message.
You will get the below screen next.
A topic subscription rule will get created here.
Key Capability 2: Debugging Capability
Developers face challenges with monitoring and debugging while working with serverless architectures.
Debugging capabilities of Serverless360:
Investigation of the run history of the logic app.
Understanding the particular Service Bus message that is getting processed.
The below image shows that you can get Sequence Number or Message-ID, etc. details.
By entering the sequence number that you have just got you can get the messages of that queue.
In the below image you can see the messages in the active queue.
Serverless360 will let you see the message properties as shown in the below image.
Serverless360 will let you see the actual message and you can find the reason for which the message is not getting processed. The details of the message can be seen as shown in the below image.
All the above procedure is performed to know why the message is not being processed. This was the procedure to retrieve messages from the queue in a ‘Peek-Lock’ mode.
Key Capability 3: We will cover another key scenario.
Replicating the scenario from staging to the production environment.
Here we will see the procedure to replicate the queues and topics from the staging environment to the production namespace.
You can select the namespace to import from the staging environment as shown in the below image.
This import facility will let you import Service Bus queues or Topics from one namespace to another as shown in the below image.
Just select the entities that you want to import and click on the Import button. Everything from Topic Subscription rules and properties will get replicated in the new namespace.
The below image shows the successful import of entities.
#4) Application-level Security
Serverless360 offers the features for Application-level Security and Auditing. If you have multiple applications. You want the access levels at the application. Azure Portal offers role-access policy definition capabilities but you can do it for entities level.
A typical business scenario can be a granular user access policy for a set of users for the composite application. You want a custom role to map multiple users. Serverless360 offers User Management features.
By default, there are two users i.e. Administrator, and Super User. The administrator has full control over the application and Super User can access the whole application. This user doesn’t have access to the Licensing and Payment section. Serverless360 supports the creation of n number of custom roles.
Defining Granular User Access Policy: You can restrict the user role to access only the specific composite application as shown in the below image.
This is about defining an access policy at an application level. Serverless360 will even allow you to restrict a user to perform certain actions as shown in the below image.
It will let you restrict the user to manage existing entities and not to create or edit new entities.
Once the custom role is created you can add the users for this role.
#5) Governance And Auditing Capabilities
Serverless360 has Governance and Auditing capabilities:
Serverless360 tracks the user actions in two segments i.e. Operations & Messaging as shown in the below image.
Conclusion
This was all about Serverless360 and its capabilities. These are just a few of its major features. It contains many more features and functionalities that will help your business with Azure serverless Monitoring and Management.
=> Visit Serverless360 Website To See All Its Features And Give It A Try
The tool offers a free trial, and you can always sign up for it to get an experience of Serverless360’s capabilities.