Hello Everyone!
My Name is Ellie Alume
and I work as Program Manager in the Azure App Service Diagnostic team.
Today we will see how the Change Analysis experience in
the Azure Portal can help troubleshoot issues with your application.
Before we Begin, This demo is for app on App Service
Whenever there is an outage or downtime
narrowing down the root cause as quickly as possible is critical.
An app may down suddenly due to various reasons
and finding out what changed from its last healthy state will help in troubleshooting and fixing the failure.
Change Analysis is a subscription level Azure Resource Provider
It tracks various types of changes ranging from infrastructure layer to application deployment files
and provides an insightful visualization showing old value and new value to help users understand the
changes that may have contributed to the issue.
Let’s walk through a scenario and see how Change Analysis will help us fix our app issue.
First let’s see how we can enable the feature. We start by going to Diagnose and Solve blade and click on Availability and Performance.
The left-hand side menu, we can see Application Changes Preview.
Once we click on that, we are taken to the Change Details blade.
By default, we can see change data from Azure Resource Graph
and Azure Resource Manager proxied changes.
It also shows us the related resources and
the option to see all resource changes in the subscription.
File and configuration change tracking can be enabled here.
Upon enabling this
Change Analysis captures the deployment and configuration state of an application every 4 hours.
It can detect, for example, changes in the application environment variables.
For demo, let’s take a web app which already has the set up done.
Here is my web app, We can see it is currently in a healthy state.
But now, browsing to the app gives us 403 error.
Let’s open Change Analysis blade to see what changed.
On the Diagnose and Solve Blade, Click on Availability and Performance.
On the left hand corner click on Application Changes.
Right away I can see that an app setting connection string
was changed recently which was causing the 403 error.
This view clearly gives us the difference between old value and new value
with the timestamp of the change.
Let’s fix this and give it a try
Go back to your web app dashboard
and on the bottom left hand corner click on configuration
Here is where I can make the fix to my web app.
I am going to select the edit Icon and
edit the string in the value section.
Once I fix that
I am going to go back and save the configuration
Now lets go back to your web app
And refresh the page
We can now see it is up and running.
Now Lets go back to the Azure Portal
You can find changes for other resources
supported by change anlysis
By typing in Application changes (typing sound)
Here is where you can find it
Let’s look at another example where app has dependency on another Azure resource.
In cloud environments
apps do not function in isolation and are often dependent on other Azure resources.
The health of dependency can affect the availability of the primary app as well.
Here is another web app which reads data from Azure Blob Storage
There were no recent deployments done to this web app, but it has started to fail.
We can troubleshoot this by using Navigator.
Let’s open Diagnose and Solve blade and click on Navigator tile.
Here we have a dependency graph showing the Azure dependencies of the app.
When we click on navigator storage, we can see recent changes here.
We find that firewall settings havebeen modified recently causing failures from the web app.
As a developer or SQL Server admin
I can easily fix the issue because I know where the problem is happening.
This is how Change Analysis enables you to track changes made to your Azure resource
and helps you in troubleshooting issues.
To Summarize, first you may enable change analysis or navigator
on your app by going to the diagnose and solve blade.
Second, you can also use change analysis to see various type of changes.
And third, you can review navigator to investigate
recent changes to your app and dependencies.
We hope you liked the video and thank you for watching!