Azure Application Gateway WAF tuning

5th of September, 2018 / / 3 Comments

The Azure Application Gateway has a Web Application Firewall (WAF) capability that can be enabled on the gateway. The WAF will use the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set 3.0 by default and there is an option to use CRS 2.2.9.
CRS 3.0 offers reduced occurrences of false positives over 2.2.9 by default. However, there may still be times when you need to tune your WAF rule sets to avoid false positives in your site.

Blocked access to the site

The Azure WAF filters all incoming requests to the servers in the backend of the Application Gateway.… [Keep reading] “Azure Application Gateway WAF tuning”

Azure Functions Logging to Application Insights

20th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

We’re going to have a look at several ways to integrate Application Insights (AppInsights) with Azure Functions (Functions).
Functions supports built-in logging features using TraceWriter instance. Basic sample function might look like:

With TraceWriter, we can log information to the log console like:

However, it has the maximum limit of 1000 records. This is good for simple debugging purposes, but not for logging. Therefore, we should store logs somewhere like database or storage.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Logging to Application Insights”

Azure WebJob logs demystified

14th of March, 2016 / / 4 Comments

Asynchronous jobs are usually hard to troubleshoot due to the very nature of its execution. This post talks about how we can monitor and trouble shoot Azure WebJobs both during development and when it is deployed on an Azure Web App. The key is to understand the layout of the logs the WebJob runtime creates during its execution.

WebJob storage accounts

To enable logging, WebJob needs two Azure storage account connection strings to be configured:

  • AzureWebJobsDashboard
  • AzureWebJobsStorage

AzureWebJobsDashboard

This storage account is primarily used by Azure WebJob SDK to store logs from the WebJobs Dashboard.… [Keep reading] “Azure WebJob logs demystified”

Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS

7th of August, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Azure Application Insights (AI) is a great instrumentation tool that can help you learn about how your application is doing during run-time. It is currently in Preview mode, so bear that in mind when developing production ready apps. It gives you the ability to log lots of different kinds of information like tracing, page views, custom events, metrics and more.

Azure AI supports multiple platforms, but unfortunately they have not released a Xamarin package yet. There is one library which is for Xamarin.Forms… [Keep reading] “Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS”

Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles

22nd of October, 2014 / / 11 Comments

Once you start publishing content to Azure Cloud Services it becomes increasingly critical to have insights into what is going on with your Web or Worker Roles without the need to manually connect to the hosts and inspect local logs.

Logging locally to file is an option but results in a couple of challenges: there is limited local persistent disk space on an Azure Role and local logging makes it hard to get an aggregated view of what’s happening across multiple Instances servicing a single Cloud Service.… [Keep reading] “Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles”