Monitoring Azure Functions

Watch Azure Function failures

Are you finding it difficult to know when your Azure Function fails?

This use case is a simplified version of a production scenario, where there is an Azure Function that plays a critical role in the business orchestration. The problem is that the product team is not aware of the failure in the Azure function.

Every Function App would have one or more functions defined. The function could fail due to any of the following reasons,

1. Binding Errors: Azure functions triggers and bindings communicate with various Azure service, which might raise errors
2. Logical Errors: Computation logic implemented in the Azure function might have unhandled exceptions

This would break the workflow and the team should be notified on the failure with the reason to take corrective action. Consider the E-Commerce business orchestration where an Azure Function listens to a Azure Service Bus Queue for new orders.

Azure Function, “ComputeCreditPoints” is created with a Queue trigger to execute whenever a new order message is enqueued to the associated Azure Service Bus Queue. The C# function takes care of computing the customer credit points based on the bill amount.

The issue here is that few of the new order messages does not contain valid values for computing the credit points and that triggers an exception in the Azure function. The requirement is to get notified on any such failure with the reason so that corrective action can be carried out.
Watch Monitor in Serverless360 can serve as a solution, where failure notification can be sent through configured notification channels with the details of the failure, within 5 minutes (this is the default notification frequency in Serverless360) of the failure occurrence.

The function invocation action failed at 2018-08-23 17:48:39
The Watch monitor detected the failure and generated the alert at 2018-08-23 17:49:43
The alert has been forwarded to the Notification Channels at 2018-08-23 17:50:31

Similar would be the requirement to get notified on the failure of trigger or run actions in a Logic App. Getting notified on the failure of Logic Apps and Azure Functions in near real-time is now possible with Serverless360.