I currently have an MVC / SQL application hosted in Azure that I would like to add push notification functionality to.
The scenario is that users register for alerts on the native mobile app (iOS / Android) and specify a latitude / longitude / radius per alert type. I'd like for each alert type to have a rules engine that evaluates on a schedule, determines the latest entries and then based on the user specified location and radius determines which users should now receive a corresponding notification.
I'm struggling to determine which Azure services should be used for this solution. I think that the Notification Hubs is the correct tool to use for sending the notifications. What I'm most unsure of is how to run the background processes on a schedule that wakes up, checks the latest entries, and selects which users to alert. I've came across WebJobs but these appear to be based on QueueInputs and monitoring storage items rather than running independent tasks?
Can someone give me some advice on the correct Azure services / SDKs that should be used to solve this scenario?
Thanks,
Brian.
WebJobs can be triggered (e.g., QueueInputs),run on-demand, on schedule or continuously.
you can also use Azure Mobile Services as it has scheduling functionality and plugs-in well with Notifications as well.
Related
I've recently been playing around with the Bing's image search api, however I have a concern I hope to resolve.
It is to do with the limit on the number of api requests that are allowed per month. After doing some reading it seems like if I were to exceed this limit, my Azure account would be billed depending on the number of api calls I have gone over my limit. Is it possible to set up some kind of alert through the Azure management portal that will stop the api from processing any more calls once a specific threshold has been passed?
If anyone has any experience using the Search api and can enlighten me, that would be great.
Try Metrics Monitoring. Go to the service within Azure Portal, Scroll Down to Monitoring -> Metrics and then click Add Metric Alert.
You can create an alert based on the number of successful calls or total calls and the alert can notify you via e-mail. Additionally, if you want to take action automatically after reaching the threshold, you can use Webhooks to make a call out to a web application or Azure Automation Runbook to automatically run PowerShell scripts or some code to prevent overuse. You can also use Logic Apps for that. Check the following link for further details and examples at the end of the page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/monitoring-and-diagnostics/insights-webhooks-alerts
I have the following resources
One Mobile/API app
One MVC app
Three Logic apps
One Azure function deployment with 5 functions
I want to have a single tracking number (correlation ID) to track across all instances at the same time. I'm looking at the Contoso Insurance sample, but I'm rebuilding it by hand (not using Azure Deploy scripts).
I've read the deployment code, but I'm not sure if I can merge app insight logs together, or if it's a hack of some sort.
Observations
When I right click on visual studio, I can only associate to Application insights instances that aren't already connected to a *app (web | mobile | api).
However, in the configuration, I can give Application insights a direct GUID which might allow me to achieve the goal of one App Insights activity log for the entire process
Question
Is it possible to have one app insights log among all Mobile/API/Logic/MVC sites?
Is there a way to have (or should I have) one standard app insights instance per web app, then a special dedicated shared app insights instance for my code to call into and log?
What is contoso insurance doing with Azure App Insights?
Jeff from Logic Apps team here -- So the answer is yes - but there are some caveats. We are working to make the experience seamless and automatic, but for now it will require the following. First as a heads up:
First, for Logic Apps we have what's called the client tracking ID -- this is a header you can set on an incoming HTTP Request or Service Bus message to track and correlate events across actions. It will be sent to all steps (functions, connectors, etc.) with the x-ms-client-tracking-id header.
Logic Apps emits all logs to Azure Monitor - which unfortunately today only has a sink into Event Hubs, Storage, and Log Analytics -- not App Insights.
With all of that in-mind, here's the architecture we see many following:
Have your web apps just emit to App Insights directly. Use some correlation ID as needed. When firing any Logic Apps, pass in the x-ms-client-tracking-id header so you can correlate events.
Log your events to App Insights in the Function app. This blog details some of how to do that, and it is also being worked on for a better experience soon.
In your logic app - either write a Function to consume events off of Azure monitor and push to App Insights, or write a function that is an App Insight "logger" that you can call in your workflow to also get the data into App Insights.
This is how Contoso Insurance is leveraging App Insights as far as I understand. We are working across all teams (App Insights, Azure Monitor, Azure Functions, Logic Apps) to make this super-simple and integrated in the coming weeks/months, but for now achievable with above. Feel free to reach out for any ?s
In our app (Azure hosted) we produce invoices, these have to be injected into an on premise accounting software. It is not possible to host an API that would be reachable from the Azure to post the invoices to.
Is it possible to create an exe that runs on-premise an that get's triggered by Azure Q-messages like WebJobs can ? Once triggered retrieve the invoice from a blob-storage-object.
Other suggestions are also welcome.
One important thing I want to mention is that even WebJobs poll the queue at predetermined interval (I believe the default is 30 seconds). Azure Queues don't support triggering mechanism like you think.
What you want to do is entirely possible though. What you could do is write a Windows Service, that essentially wakes up at a predetermined interval and checks for messages in the queue. If it finds messages, then it processes those messages otherwise go back to sleep again.
I am investigating migrating from Azure Mobile Services push notifications to Azure Notification Hubs for two primary benefits: 1) pub/sub architecture using tags, and 2) abstracting the device registration.
However, I'm struggling to understand the pattern for device badge value management.
With mobile services push notifications it's straightforward to maintain the current badge value in the db for individual device registrations. But with Notifications Hubs where Azure maintains the 'subscribed' devices registrations and manages the fan out of device notifications, what is the best approach for the client devices to update their current badge value with Azure Notification Hubs?
I have reviewed the Azure documentation, viewed several of the excellent overview videos, such as Channel 9 Cloud Cover episode 100, but documentation and examples seem to be lacking with regard to Notification Hubs and management of badge values.
Thanks for your help, friends!
Unfortunately badge management is not straightforward in a pub/sub architecture. If you use tags to indicate individual users then you can keep your counter in your backend and then add it in your notification when sending to your hub.
In you are using tags as interest group, then things are not straightforward, and they depend on what you want that count to be. For some platforms (i.e. iOS and ANdroid) you can code some client code that keeps a personalized counter. Some other times however, one has to avoid keeping personalized counters and resort to use generic badges like "!" in Windows 8.
I want to make a dashboard which shows the status of our Azure services bus queues and displays the history for "messages added to queue", "length of queue" and "messages processed" etc. Using the Azure Management Portal, I can see that most of these statistics manually for each queue.
Is there any way to get access to the data that is displayed in the Management Portal through one of the APIs as I want to combine the data from number of queues that we use into a single interface. I have searched in vain but I don't want to log my own statistics as that seems like redoing a task that Microsoft already perform.
Currently with REST API all I can see is how to get the current approximate count of messages in the queue.
There is an API for this now (wasn't back when the OP created the thread):
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/azure/dn163589.aspx (REST)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt348562.aspx (.NET)
Also, I believe it should be available via Azure Insights API:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.azure.insights.aspx
It is possible to fetch the Count of Messages in a Queue, Incoming Messages, Outgoing Messages with the help of the latest Azure Monitor Metrics, with which you can build you own Dashboard. Or you can make use of the Azure Monitor in Azure portal, which allows you to configure dashboards and alerts.