How to Monitor Multiple Azure Subscriptions Using Composite Application
In most circumstances, organizations find the need to maintain multiple Microsoft Azure subscriptions. This will create a need to monitor multiple Azure subscriptions. These subscriptions are allocated to various tenants to be managed. You can draw an instance from various companies with online windows to aid their services.
Let’s say an organization offers combined services like online booking of flight tickets, haulage services management, hotel booking, etc. Each of these areas comes with a peculiar database as well as multiple environments such as Dev, Staging, and Production. From this example, assuming there are subscriptions on every tenant. There will be a need for a unifying interface. Having a single interface to monitor multiple Azure subscriptions will require some special integration of the suitable application. This is where the Composite Application comes in.
Let’s Look at Some Common Complaints from Users
People that have been using Microsoft Azure have loads of credits to give. Nevertheless, there are also streaks concerns that call for attention. Some of the common complaints from users have always been about the issue of no consolidated monitoring. This is the most prominent of all. But there are also issues of poor application level-security, lack of deep integrated tooling, and poor application visibility.
Our concentration is more on the issue of poor consolidated monitoring. The introduction of composite application has been pretty effective in solving this problem. With the composite application, multiple Microsoft Azure subscriptions can be effectively monitored.
What then is Composite Application?
We first talk about components. Components, in this context, are those separately deployable parts of your micro-services application.
Note that these are different from observed external dependencies like EventHub, SQL, etc. Your organization will, most likely, not have access to these observed external dependencies. However, they have full access to components.
A composite application is developed through combined multiple functions fused into one application. In other words, these are applications with functions drawn from different sources. When new functions are needed, a composite application are incorporated into local application logic and how they interact.
Managing Microsoft Azure
For organizations with need to monitor multiple Azure subscriptions, managing them requires the integration of the composite application. This will give users a unifying interface to view the operations of different subscriptions. The composite application architecture is fashioned to enable users to bring participating entities into desired groups.
These entities may be from different resources and regions. Despite their different allotted functions, they can be grouped into a composite application dashboard. On this said dashboard, users will have easy access to the present state of the respective entities. I’m talking about the entities that make up the business orchestration.
This provision makes it easy for the observer to access real-time feedback on the entity status.
To make all these possible, certain steps ought to be taken. First, is making a connection between Azure subscription and composite application. Doing this requires an active Azure directly application. This needs a contributor level of access.
Applying Composite Application to Monitoring of Multiple Azure Subscriptions
With a composite application, you can see the performance of your general Azure subscription. The app automatically deploys a composite Map that captures all specified areas of the subscriptions. This deployed map finds and integrates components by following HTTP dependency call between servers. It normally follows the installed Application Insights SDK. And then it continues this way with a progressive integration of components.
So, you’ve got to first load the application map. Upon doing this, a set of queries will pop up. This will trigger the discovery of new components that are related.
You will find a button at the top left corner. Routinely clicking on this button will update the number of components discovered and those available.
By clicking “Update map components”, the map will refresh and show all components discovered. It may not be necessary to start the discovery process, especially if the components are roles within a single application insight resource. For this type of application, the first load will capture all the components.
The key goal here is to be able to monitor your multiple Microsoft Azure subscription on an interface without hassles. As soon as the various components are discovered, performances are assessed.
Click on any of the discovered components. The related insights of the component will pop-up. You could simply navigate to the performance and failure triangle to get a detailed performance of that component.
You can follow the displayed steps to investigate the performance of that component. When there is a failure, you can easily troubleshoot to understand why.
Final words
Composite Application is vital to the effective monitoring of multiple Azure subscriptions It is a verified approach to bringing functional subscriptions to a single interface for monitoring. For organizations, the adoption of this application can go a long way to saving costs.