Microsoft Azure App Services is a group of serverless resources that enable you to build and host web apps, mobile back ends, event-driven functions, and RESTful APIs without managing infrastructure. It can host workloads of all sizes and offers auto-scaling and high availability options.
Datadog provides monitoring capabilities for all Azure App Services resource types:
The Datadog extension for Azure App Services provides additional monitoring capabilities for Azure Web Apps. This support includes:
Trace_ID injection into application logs.If you haven’t already, set up the Microsoft Azure integration first.
The extension only supports Azure App Service Web Apps. Function Apps are not supported.
The Datadog .NET APM extension supports the following .NET runtimes in both x64 and x86 architectures when running on Windows instances (AAS does not yet support extensions on Linux). For more details about automatically instrumented libraries, see the Tracer documentation.
Datadog recommends doing regular updates to the latest version of the extension to ensure optimal performance, stability, and availability of features. Note that both the initial install and subsequent updates require your web app to be fully stopped in order to install/update successfully.
Note: Datadog automatic instrumentation relies on the .NET CLR Profiling API. This API allows only one subscriber (for example, APM). To ensure maximum visibility, run only one APM solution within your application environment.
Configure the Azure integration to monitor your web app and verify it is configured correctly by ensuring that you see an azure.app_service.count metric tagged with the name of your web application. Note: This step is critical for metric/trace correlation, functional trace panel views in the Datadog portal, and accurate billing.
Open the Azure Portal and navigate to the dashboard for the Azure App Services instance you wish to instrument with Datadog.
Go to the Application settings tab of the Configuration page.
Add your Datadog API key as an application setting called DD_API_KEY and a value of your Datadog API Key.
Configure optional application settings:
DD_SITE to datadoghq.com).DD_ENV to group your traces and custom statistics.DD_SERVICE to specify a service name (defaults to your web app name).DD_LOGS_INJECTION:true for correlation with application logs from your web app.Click Save (this restarts your application).
Go to the Azure extensions page and select the Datadog APM extension.
Accept the legal terms, click OK, and wait for the installation to complete. Note: the web app must be in a stopped state for this step to complete successfully.
Start the main application, click Start:
Sending logs from your application in Azure App Services to Datadog requires the use of Serilog. Submitting logs with this method allows for trace ID injection, which makes it possible to connect logs and traces in Datadog. To enable trace ID injection with the extension, add the application setting DD_LOGS_INJECTION:true.
Note: Since this occurs inside your application, any Azure Platform logs you submit with diagnostic settings does not include the trace ID.
See documentation on setting up agentless logging with Serilog for detailed instructions.
The App Services extension includes an instance of DogStatsD (Datadog’s metrics aggregation service). This enables you to submit custom metrics, service checks, and events directly to Datadog from Azure Web Apps with the extension.
Writing custom metrics and checks in your web app is similar to the process for doing so with an application on a host running the Datadog Agent. To submit custom metrics to Datadog from Azure App Services using the extension:
Note: Unlike the standard DogStatsD config process, there is no need to set ports or a server name when initializing the DogStatsD configuration. There are ambient environment variables in Azure App Service that determine how the metrics are sent (requires v6.0.0+ of the DogStatsD client).
To send metrics use this code:
try
{
// Configure your DogStatsd client and configure any tags
DogStatsd.Configure(new StatsdConfig() { ConstantTags = new[] { "app:sample.mvc.aspnetcore" } });
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
// An exception is thrown by the Configure call if the necessary environment variables are not present.
// These environment variables are present in Azure App Services, but
// need to be set in order to test your custom metrics: DD_API_KEY:{api_key}, DD_AGENT_HOST:localhost
// Ignore or log the exception as it suits you
Console.WriteLine(ex);
}
// Send a metric
DogStatsd.Increment("sample.startup");
Learn more about custom metrics.
It is likely that you do not have the Azure integration configured to monitor your application. Proper configuration improves your ability to correlate metrics, traces, and logs in the Datadog platform, as well as to avoid broken or empty screens. To fix this:
a. Ensure you have installed the Azure integration for the Azure subscription where your application is running. b. Ensure that any App Service Plan filtering rules you may have applied include the App Service Plan where the app is running. Tags on the app itself are not used for filtering.
a. Verify you’ve set DD_SITE and DD_API_KEY correctly.
b. Do a full stop and start of your application.
c. If not resolved, try uninstalling the extension and re-installing (this also ensures you are running the latest version).
d. Still need help? Contact Datadog support.
Note: To expedite the process of investigating application errors with the support team, set DD_TRACE_DEBUG:true and add the content of the Datadog logs directory (%AzureAppServiceHomeDirectory%\LogFiles\datadog) to your email.
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
