Monitoring Metrics and Best Practices for Azure Web Apps

Amaresh Pelleti

Monitoring your Azure Web App is crucial for ensuring its performance, stability, and responsiveness. Utilizing various metrics and setting up appropriate alerts based on best practices allows you to proactively manage your application’s health. Here are some key metrics to monitor and best practices along with examples for setting up alerts:

CPU Usage:

  • Metric: Monitor CPU percentage utilization.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for sustained CPU usage above 80% for 5 minutes.
  • Action: Notify DevOps team to investigate or automatically scale the app.

Memory Usage:

  • Metric: Monitor memory consumption.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for memory usage above 70% for 5 minutes.
  • Action: Notify operations team to optimize or scale resources.

HTTP Server Errors:

  • Metric: Monitor 4xx and 5xx HTTP status codes.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for a sudden increase in 5xx errors.
  • Action: Investigate and inform development team for resolution.

Request Execution Time:

  • Metric: Monitor time taken for request processing.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for execution times beyond a predefined limit.
  • Action: Investigate bottlenecks, optimize code, or scale resources.

Data In/Out:

  • Metric: Monitor incoming and outgoing data traffic.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for irregular spikes or drops in traffic.
  • Action: Investigate changes and plan for scaling or resource optimization.

Failed Requests:

  • Metric: Monitor the count of failed requests.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for a significant increase in failed requests.
  • Action: Investigate failures, resolve issues, and potentially scale the app.

HTTP Queue Length:

  • Metric: Monitor the number of requests in the queue.
  • Threshold: Set alerts for high queue length indicating congestion.
  • Action: Scale app or optimize processing to reduce queue length.

Monitoring these metrics and setting up alerts based on the specified thresholds and actions helps maintain the reliability and performance of your Azure Web App. Adjust these parameters according to your app’s specific performance characteristics.

By employing these best practices, you can ensure proactive management, timely issue resolution, and optimal performance for your Azure Web App.