A couple weeks back our Mobile App was migrated from the old portal to the new one and it hasn't behaved properly since.
Our main issues are:
We cannot access any logs files, the tab for Diagnostics logs stopped working entirely on Wednesday but even before that we never got any useful data out of this. When something goes wrong with our nodejs backend we can't find any clue as to what went wrong like we could in our old portal under the logs tab.
We are unable to access the FTP server entirely, it just won't let us login even though the credentials are correct and have been reset multiple times in attempts to get them working.
The server is throwing errors about not having enough disk space left even though we should have 53Gb to go (we're currently using 1.05Gb out of 55Gb)
Our deployments slots are not working at all, when we push our code to the deployment slot it just doesn't work, every request we make to the deployment slots tells us we're not allowed to do anything.
We are running a standard tier Mobile App server. The backend is in NodeJS, our CMS is in ASP.Net and our app itself is in Xamarin Forms.
The issues started after we migrated the server a couple weeks back from the manage.azure.com portal to portal.azure.com.
What can we do?
Edit:
We got through to Microsoft via the payed support plan which we're getting refunded because these are basic functionalities which don't work as advertised after the migration. I've got a call with them in about three hours to get things sorted, if I learn anything we can do ourselves I will update this post to share the knowledge.
This needs to be a support request to Microsoft.
If you can, open an incident with Microsoft Support. If you can't, post a question in the MSDN Community Forum. (We need to ask about particulars of your site and that isn't an appropriate topic for SO)
As the architecture of Mobile Apps is changed from Mobile Services, now the mobile apps migrate to Azure App Services.
Actually the Mobile Apps backend in Node.js is an expressjs project, and the mobile app sdk for node is a middleware of express. So the way for diagnostics and troubleshooting has changed from before we use Mobile Service. You can refer to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-mobile-node-backend-how-to-use-server-sdk/#Debugging for details about Debugging and troubleshooting for mobile services.
Additionally, we can leverage the Visual Studio Team Services editor as the section How to: Edit code in Visual Studio Team Services shows in the link above, we can monitor the output of the Mobile Apps backend application. E.G:
About your FTP issue, please double check your deployment Username, when we login to FTP server on Azure, we need to input the full FTP user name which is "app\username":
You can refer to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-configure/#enabling-diagnostic-logs for details.
Related
I have a web app written in Node and hosted as an Azure web app. I have setup Application Insights web tests for other sites that do NOT require auth and these work fine. Now I need to test a route that requires authentication, but it is not obvious how to do this on the Azure Portal. Can this actually be done? I have seen some posts about doing this through Visual Studio but I really want to avoid that if at all possible.
As per the article here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-insights/app-insights-overview - if you don't want to touch code (and hence, redeploy) you cannot do what you are asking in the question.
Looks like diving deep into code is the only way
Having created a mobile app in Azure using EasyTables with a Node.js backend, I get an HTTP 500 error trying to post a new item.
Log in to the Azure console and in the project backend run:
npm i sqlite3
That fixes it.
(Answering my own question because I couldn't find this anywhere on StackOverflow. Props to #benjamintam from Readify for the solution)
If your mobile app application is running on Azure cloud not on locally, the issue is a little odd, as the sqlite 3 supporting is for Azure Mobile Apps development on local. You can refer to https://azure.github.io/azure-mobile-apps-node/module-azure-mobile-apps_src_configuration_DataProviders.html for the detailed description.
If your issue occurs on your Mobile Apps running on Azure, please double check whether you have completed the project's initialization. You can refer to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-mobile-android-get-started/#configure-the-server-project for the steps.
Meanwhile, you can manually add the data connection to Azure SQL in the Azure portal,
And if successfully, you can find the configuration MS_TableConnectionString in Application settings in your Mobile Apps.
Any further concern, please feel free to let me know.
I am using Azure Web Apps to host my website. The website is loaded from a native apps for iOS and Android. During normal days non peak time , the web is operating as expected. However, from time to time , we are going to push out notification via apns or google gcm and that will drive users back to the apps. From there, content will be loaded from the website which is hosted from the Azure Web Apps.
During this peak times where there are thousands of requests coming in, there will be very high degree of fallout which results in errors.
It is shown in the picture below .
Traffic of the web apps after the push notification blasts
I have make sure that the database will not have any bottleneck during the operation. We are using SQL from Azure as well.
From the new portal, we are using service tier 'S1' for the App Services.
Previously, when the apps are developed, Web Apps and Mobile Services are separate service which are now join to become App Services.
Is there anything I could adjust from the azure backend or there is something which I missed out to handle ? Currently , we are also making the instance to be auto scaling.
As in conclusion, during high concurrent requests rushing in, the web apps seems to stop responding.
I would propose to implement the retry logic if there is no such yet and troubleshoot using the different modes.
UPD:
There is a detailed "analyzing performance" official guidance here - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-web-troubleshoot-performance-degradation/ .
The most simple way to understand (or just mitigate) if the issue if somehow related to the underlying backend (throttling etc) is to change the mode site is working in. In your case, it can be S or even P.
Next step, if we eliminate the possibility of the throttling/etc, is to implement the diagnostics. My favourite tool is Application Insights, there is New Relic and other great tools as well. There are good guidances i saw and used:
http://www.asp.net/aspnet/overview/developing-apps-with-windows-azure/building-real-world-cloud-apps-with-windows-azure/monitoring-and-telemetry
https://github.com/mspnp/performance-optimization/blob/master/Assessing-System-Performance-Against-KPI.md#insertlink#
So, there is not silver answer about your question - highload is highload :-) Without access to the sources and website, and load tests results it is difficult to say what component of the project behaves itself bad.
If that is the helpful answer, please mark it as a helpful or as the answer. Thanks!
I'm in the process of evaluating App Service and in particular Api apps and logic apps. I want to be able to make use of git deploy for an Api app instance.
This article https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/web-sites-publish-source-control/ mentions that even though it is based on web apps, you can apply the same processes to api apps, however, when I attempted to follow the tutorial using an api app instance, I was unable to see the "deployment" tile on the api app blade in the azure portal. I was able to complete the tutorial for the web app instance.
Does anyone know why I wouldn't be able to see the deployment tile for an api app blade?
I want to use the api app so I can make full use of swagger and the logic app service.
Edit
Thinking about it, do I even need to use an api app or could I get away with using a web app (with swagger meta data) for connecting to logic apps?
Update
Found it - see my own answer.
OK, I found it and it's not a bug. I was being (a bit) dumb. Following this article, I discovered that I needed to click on the Api app host section and then all settings then continuous deployment.
This is, imho, a poor UX decision here, given the blade looks exactly the same as others that do have the deployment tile, but at least I can set up git deploy for my api apps now.
#Simon
This may be a bug - I will poke the Azure Team for it asking that. Even though, WebApp, APIApp and MobileApp are EXACTLY the same service, only changing name. So, if you can see deployment tile for one of them, you should be able to see all others then.
BUT, there is a "invisible business link" around them that make all things working. When you work with Logic Apps, it will search for custom API Apps at - guess what! - you API App list. So, you can host a API application at WebApp, but probably the Logic App will not go for it by default.
I am currently doing some research for the development of a mobile application for our company that should support offline data sync (on an iPad). We have explored many possibilities including PhoneGap/Cordova, Xamarin and simply native iOS development. Xamarin, for many different reasons, seems to be our best choice, so my question will assume we will develop in Xamarin.
I was looking into a library for managing offline data synchronization and the most obvious solution is Microsoft Azure MobileServices. However, my company is Canadian, and apparently it's hard to trust (legally) our data to clouds based in the US. Since we already deployed internally our WebApi on our intranet, I figured there was probably a way to point the MobileServices library to our own WebApi. I have read about the Azure Hybrid Connection possibility, but our data still conveying through Microsoft servers might not be a possibility. So, my question is this:
Is there a way to configure the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.MobileServices Client library to point directly to our intranet, RESTful WebApi backend, without going through any Microsoft Azure servers ?
I understand that, in order to be able to use the Client librairies seamlessly, we probably would have to adapt our WebApi to implement the necessary .net Backend interfaces. I'm mostly wondering if it's even possible as the MSDN documentation on the libraries all seem to point to direct connections to their servers (no possibilities to configure your own connection strings) and all instructions redirect you to their Azure Mobile Services website.
Thank you.
If you look at the API for your mobile client, you'll notice that the Azure Mobile Services Client SDK only cares about two things:
new AzureMobileClient( url, appkey)
...where it's hosted shouldn't be a concern. Everything else is just configuration.
If you want to host the Azure Mobile Services Backend on your own servers, technically you could do this, but there are likely a few caveats. Microsoft has announced that they will be launching a Canadian Azure data center, but we won't see it until 2016.
In the meantime, here's how you can host the services locally. Note that I have not tried to emulate all of the features of Azure Mobile Services (aka Zumo) so your mileage (or kilometerage) will vary.
Hosting Locally:
From a technical feasibility, you absolutely can run the services locally. I know this because you can create the Azure Mobile Services Backend project from within Visual Studio and run it locally for development purposes. This is what our development team does for testing their mobile applications.
Note that you can create the Azure Mobile Service backend directly from within Visual Studio: New Project -> Cloud -> Azure Mobile Service. You can also download the exact same template (pre-configured with your URL and ApplicationKey) directly from the Azure dashboard: Create -> Mobile Service.
Obviously, if you're hosting it on your server it will be up to you to configure and use a proper SSL certificate for your site.
ZUMO Permissions:
By default, the security roles on the server are turned off. So if you're locking down any of your methods using the [AuthorizeLevel] attribute these settings will be ignored at runtime. If you need to enable this feature you can do so by modifying the WebApiConfig.Register() method and marking the site as self-hosted: config.SetSelfHosted(true).
Configuration:
From a configuration perspective, the Azure Mobile Service dashboard provides several tabs for configuring Identity, Push Notifications, Connection Strings and App Settings. Sadly, you won't have a dashboard, but all of these settings have a corresponding value in the local web.config. Any value you provide here is automatically overwritten in Azure, but they're used when running locally.
The minimum settings you'll need to configure are listed here. The ApplicationKey you can distribute with your ZuMo client, but the MasterKey is for the Admin authorization level so you'll want to keep that secret. The MobileServiceName is used by the EntityFramework for your database schema and what appears in the URL of your site.
<add key="MS_MobileServiceName" value="myzumosite" />
<add key="MS_MasterKey" value="masterkey" />
<add key="MS_ApplicationKey" value="appkey" />
Values that start with a MS_ prefix map to corresponding values in the Azure Portal. MS_GoogleClientID and MS_GoogleClientSecret map to the Google Identity values in the dashboard, for example.
Any other value in the AppSettings node is immediately accessible via the ApiServices.Settings property and corresponds to the Settings node in the Azure dashboard.
Database connection strings continue to exist in the connectionStrings node. The same is true for azure notification hub.
Database:
Obviously, the database you configure will be up to you as well. Permissions and User accounts are also obvious. There may be some minor differences between the SQL Azure syntax for Entity Framework database migration scripts that you'll need to worry about. (I've discovered the database migration scripts don't work from the Package Manager, but they do work when the database scripts are run when your website starts)
Caveats:
You will not have a nice dashboard for monitoring performance of your site, reviewing logs or changing runtime settings
You will not be able to scale out your site immediately; Scaling and deployment will be your problem
Deployment configuration is your responsibility (Project -> Publish won't be available unless you configure it)
Not sure if you'll be able to use Azure Active Directory as an authentication scheme, though from the sounds of it that won't be a concern. You can write your own authentication providers: Microsoft's Zumo library only supports a handful, but the underlying Owin.Security package that Microsoft uses supports several dozen systems!
Your site will need to be publically visible to your mobile clients
Push Notifications should work, but you will be using Azure's notification hub for this.
I have no idea where ApiServices.Log will go
The easiest path to take would be to:
Create the Mobile Service in Azure to get the notification hub and settings preconfigured
Download the starter site from the dashboard
Configure the web.config as mentioned here.
It's not possible to simply configure WAMS Client library to work with your own WebApi Backend.
But WAMS library is available at github, so I'm sure you can reuse a lot of code from the WAMS project, especially if you want to use a PCL project.
To route your data securly through Azure, you could think about setting up express route. Additionally, for last weeks update, it's possible to apply a custom domain to the WAMS Backend, including your own certificate to secure your connection.