Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Azure Application Insights - APM integration with Java Applications

Azure Application Insights - APM integration with Java Applications

The focus of this article is to detail about integration of Java based application monitoring into Application Insights.

The following is the Agenda :

1) Brief Introduction about Azure Application Insights

2) Setup a sample Java Application on WildFly server running on Azure Virtual machine

3) Publish the Application and allow it to be accessible from LAN (VNET) and Internet

4) Provisioning of Azure Application Insights

5) Integration of sample java application with Application Insights

6) Application Insights monitoring dashboards

If you are specifically looking for the integration of Java application with Application sights, skip the sections and have a look into Step : 5) Integration of sample java application with Application Insights


Application Insights

Application insight is a Microsoft Azure native APM monitoring tool which helps the developers and DevOps professionals to understand about the application performance and how it is being used.

Image Reference : Microsoft Official documentation


Application Insights is billed based on the volume of telemetry data that your application sends and the number of web tests that you choose to run, The telemetry data is billed per Azure Log Analytics data ingestion rates.



https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview


2 & 3) Setup a sample Java Application on WildFly server running on Azure Virtual machine

Here i’m going to host a sample java application on wildfly 20.4 installed on windows server 2019 azure virtual machine.


Step 1: Installing Azure windows virtual machine


Reference : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/create-windows-virtual-machine-in-azure/3-exercise-create-a-vm 


Step 2: Install and configure Java & wildfly server


Reference: https://darrenoneill.eu/?p=594 


For the testing purpose you could run the wildfly server from binary instead of installing it as a service.


I’ve copied the wildfly server directory into C:\ 


By default wildfly server listen on port 8080 for web service and 9990 for management console

http://localhost:8080

http://localhost:9990 


Create a user account to login to Wildfly management console.


Navigate to C:\wildfly-24.0.0.Final\bin\ and run add-user.bat or add-user.ps1 (for windows OS)




Hit enter and input the password while prompt in the interactive cmd window


Open a browser tab and access wildfly management console http://localhost:9990 


Step 3: Host a Sample Java application


Download the Sample Web App war file from the link below Link.


Reference: https://github.com/AKSarav/SampleWebApp/raw/master/dist/SampleWebApp.war 


Open a browser tab and access wildfly management console http://localhost:9990 


Navigate to “Deployments” and drag & drop the Sample Web App war file into the right side pane which deploys the application in wildfly.


Open a new tab in the browser and try to access the webapp http://localhost:8080/SampleWebApp 



Step 4: Allow the WebApp to be accessible from LAN and internet.

Navigate to WildFly server root directory C:\wildfly-24.0.0.Final\standalone\configuration and open standalone.xml


Amend the following in standalone.xml


    <interfaces>

        <interface name="management">

            <inet-address value="${jboss.bind.address.management:0.0.0.0}"/>

        </interface>

        <interface name="public">

            <inet-address value="${jboss.bind.address:0.0.0.0}"/>

        </interface>

    </interfaces>



Restart the WildFly server by closing and re-ran standalone.bat file under C:\wildfly-24.0.0.Final\bin



Now you will be able to access the webapp using the network  interface IP address of your virtual machine.




Step 5: To Allow your webapp to be accessible from Internet

SInce it is a lab I'm exposing the virtual machine directly to the internet which is not at all recommended on any cloud hosted environments.

Application gateway, Proxy, Firewall, load balancer or any other flavor of load balancers can be added  in front of your virtual machine based on your wish to secure the traffic

Whitelist port 8080 on windows firewall (check IP tables if you’ve choose Linux)


Open a  powershell window and input the below command


New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "ALLOW TCP PORT 8080" -Direction inbound -Profile Any -Action Allow -LocalPort 8080 -Protocol TCP


Open port 8080 on Azure network security group attached to virtual machine on subnet.


Get the public IP address associated with the virtual machine and access it from your local computer to make sure it is accessible.



Now your infrastructure and application is ready to explore Application insights.


4) Provisioning of Azure Application Insights


Login to your Azure subscription and on the search bar type “Application Insights” then click on the create button.


Here I’m going to create a classic Application Insights which is going to be deprecated in the near future, you could try out the one which is work-space based (ie use Log Analytics work space).




Fill up the basic details and click on review and create.




5) Integration of sample java application with Application Insights

Configure Application Insights JavaAgent on WebServer


The Agent configuration can be done in 2 ways: inserting a piece of code into your application code but it is now old school.


So we will be using JavaAgent (Agent based monitoring which captures heath, state and performance of the application from inside of it).


Login to the virtual machine, create a directory for AppInsight under any volume, download and copy the agent into it.


Download JavaAgent provided by Microsoft from the below link


https://github.com/microsoft/ApplicationInsights-Java/releases/download/3.1.1/applicationinsights-agent-3.1.1.jar 



Create  a new file with name and extension applicationinsights.json 


  • Strictly follow the naming convention (applicationinsights) and file extension (json)

  • The file must be placed in the directory/folder on which the applicationinsights-agent-3.1.1.jar file is copied.



Login to Azure portal → Application Insights → Your application insights → Overview → copy the connection string.



Login back to the virtual machine -> Navigate to the file applicationinsights.json and open it in a notepad or notepad ++ → copy eth connection string as shown below and save the file


Navigate to “”C:\wildfly-24.0.0.Final\bin” and open “”standalone.conf.bat” file.


Input the following parameters into the file.


set "JAVA_OPTS=-javaagent:C:\wildfly-24.0.0.Final\AppInsight\applicationinsights-agent-3.1.1.jar -Xms768m -Xmx6144m -XX:MetaspaceSize=1152M -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=3072m"


what if you choose Springboot, Tomcat, jetty or websphere for hosting your application ?

Refer the below article for the java-standalone-arguments


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/java-standalone-arguments



Restart the WildFly server by closing and re-ran standalone.bat file under C:\wildfly-24.0.0.Final\bin


When the wildfly server boots up you will be able to find the below in the cmd.



It means your configuration is loaded as expected and soon it will start sending application telemetries to the Application Insights.


Navigate back to the AppInsight directory and you could see a log file “applicationinsights.log”

 


Repeat above steps on all other virtual machines hosted with same application parse the logs and telemetry to Application Insights


6) Application Insights monitoring dashboards


The focus of this write up is to help developers or DevOps/Cloud engineers to integrate java based applications into Azure application Insights APM.


Few screenshots from Application Insights to understand about the basic capabilities of the Azure services offering.


Overview of your Application performance



Application map (display various components and integration in the App)




Live Metrics from your App




Availability of the Application from different geographic regions.


You could create a classic or standard rule to measure the availability of the application.




Failures within the Application



Drill down reports for each case.



Performance of the Application



Number of Active session to the Application



A report on usage cost



Thanks for reading and Hope it helps.


Reference :


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/create-windows-virtual-machine-in-azure/3-exercise-create-a-vm


https://darrenoneill.eu/?p=594


https://github.com/AKSarav/SampleWebApp/raw/master/dist/SampleWebApp.war


https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/java-standalone-arguments

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Azure Microsoft Learn Practice Lab Reference

 Azure Microsoft Learn Practice Lab Reference

Microsoft learn is one of the learning platform which helped me to upgrade my skills in Azure cloud infrastructure.

If you're looking for a study guide to get start with Azure cloud journey, i would strongly recommend to start with Microsoft Learn - Azure.

Microsoft learn provide free sandbox for practicing the labs along with informative documentation.


In-order to get start you need not to have a credit/debit card, instead a Microsoft account is more than enough.

Here I've consolidated the list of selected Lab exercises which helps you all to learn Azure cloud.

Try it out from today and practice the Lab for free.

Activation of Labs are self explanatory, just follow the documentation.

Good Luck 👍

Azure Compute


1) Virtual machines























Exercise - Create an image of an Azure VM from the Azure CLI and provision a new VM




2) APP Service










3) Azure Function















Azure Storage



You can use above Lab exercise for practicing Blob, File, Queue and Table storage

1) Blob Storage






2) Queue Storage





3) Azure Storage CORS





4) Azure Storage - Static Website and CDN









5) WebApp and Azure Storage











6) Azure Disk Storage




Azure Network


Exercise - Design and implement IP addressing for Azure virtual networks - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/design-ip-addressing-for-azure/5-exercise-implement-vnets



















Azure Active Directory











Management and Governance 


Exercise - Use metric alerts to alert on performance issues in your Azure environment - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/incident-response-with-alerting-on-azure/4-exercise-metric-alerts

Exercise - Use activity log alerts to alert on events within your Azure infrastructure - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/incident-response-with-alerting-on-azure/7-exercise-activity-log-alerts