Serverless 360 : Azure Serverless Monitoring and Management Platform

July 6, 2021

Serverless 360 is an Azure Serverless Monitoring and Management platform. It can monitor your complete serverless integration solutions.

Azure Portal is specially designed for vertical technology silos but the real-time scenario involves the integrated cloud applications that require at least 3 to 4 different Azure services. They are not always built in a single technology stack and hence it gets difficult to visualize and manage such connected solutions with Azure Portal.

Serverless360 is a tool that will help you to manage and monitor all your distributed Azure services in one place. Serverless360 can solve the challenges faced by businesses while working with Azure portal and resources, such as no application visibility, no integrated tooling, no consolidated monitoring, message processing, no auditing, no application-level security, etc.

1)Application Visibility:

The dashboard will provide a view of all your serverless applications in one place. Here is the composite application dashboard of Serverless360. In this image, you can see the composite applications defined to represent the business solution. Serverless360 has an intuitive UI.

Serverless360 will allow you to add resources from different Azure subscriptions and regions into composite applications. You can view them here on the dashboard with the business solutions they are solving.

2) Consolidated Monitoring:

Serverless360 provides the feature of consolidated monitoring. It has Status Monitor, Data Monitor, Threshold Monitor, and Watch Monitor.

Status Monitor: If your business solution is using Azure serverless components like Service Bus Queues, Logic Apps, and Function Apps and your monitoring requirement is to get the status update on all the resources at every one-hour interval.

You want to share the status report with the team members over Slack then Serverless360 has the solution of Status Monitor. Configuring a Status Monitor: Creating/Editing the Status Monitor: A status Monitor is present in every Composite Application created. Serverless360 will allow you to create any number of status monitors as per your requirement.

Defining the Status Monitor: You can edit the status monitor configuration and define the frequency to generate the status report. You can even configure the status report to get alerts only if there is any violation. You can refer to the below image for the Edit option.

3) Deep Integrated Tooling:

We will take an example of an order processing scenario to understand this deep scenario. There is a website for customers. Customers can submit an order. When an order is placed by a customer, a new service bus message is pushed into the service bus queue. There is a logic app that picks the message from the queue for processing. The azure function will validate the order and return the status to Service Bus Topic. In this topic, there is a Topic Subscription rule that is defined to handle messages according to status value.

Azure developers have some challenges to complete this solution in Azure Portal. One challenge is defining topic subscription rules. This can’t be achieved through a portal. Serverless360 has this capability and will help you with such scenarios. When you associate a resource with a composite application, then, managing and monitoring resources will be easier. The Service Bus queue is shown in the below image. There is a list of management capabilities that you can perform on them.

4) Application-level Security:

Serverless360 offers the features for Application-level Security and Auditing. If you have multiple applications. You want the access levels at the application. Azure Portal offers role-access policy definition capabilities but you can do it for entities level.

A typical business scenario can be a granular user access policy for a set of users for the composite application. You want a custom role to map multiple users. Serverless360 offers User Management features. By default, there are two users i.e. Administrator, and Super User. The administrator has full control over the application and Super User can access the whole application. This user doesn’t have access to the Licensing and Payment section. Serverless360 supports the creating of n number of custom roles.

5) Governance And Auditing Capabilities:

Let us understand this capability better by picking up the message resubmission scenario as example. Consider a Service Bus Queue, one of the dead letter messages in this queue need to be repaired and resubmitted. A Serverless360 user, authorized to perform this action had successfully modified the message content, added an user property and resubmitted the message. This Repair and Resubmit action will be tracked by Governance and Audit capability in Serverelss360. Any user authorized to access Governance and Audit can view the details Serverless360 has a powerful operational governance and auditing capability to maintain the logs of the user activities in the system. This feature helps the administrators to find out “Who did what and when?” in the Azure integration scenario over a period of time. Consider a few example scenarios when the support user:

Accidentally delete a Logic App
Changes the properties of a Queue
Repair and re-submit a message with incorrect details

In these situations, if the user action is recorded and logged as an event, it will help the administrator to identify the root cause of the issue. Right now, in Azure Portal, none of the activities are audited. This leaves organizations to run their support purely based on trust, which may not be ideal in some mission-critical situations like Healthcare, Financial services etc.

Conclusion:

This was all about Serverless360 and its capabilities. These are just a few of its major features. It contains many more features and functionalities that will help your business with Azure serverless Monitoring and Management.