Observing distributed application health using Azure Application Insights & Azure Log Analytics

Geert van der Cruijsen - February 4, 2019

Most people who use Azure Application insights to monitor their applications will not look at it until something is wrong and only then will they look for what exceptions are thrown to see what is going on.

Setting up Azure Monitor to trigger your Azure Function

Rob Bos - January 21, 2019

In this post, Rob shows you how to set up Azure Monitor to trigger your Azure Function on changes in your Azure Subscriptions. With that function you can now act on any changes to your resources!

Missing Azure Functions Logs

Rob Bos - January 15, 2019

After testing with an Azure Function that had a cron expression on the timer trigger to run 'once every two hours', based on the example from the Microsoft documentation I noticed that some logs for the runs weren't there! Read the entire blogpost.

Stop using ARM templates! Use the Azure CLI instead

Pascal Naber - November 12, 2018

Are you still applying the best and easiest way to provision resources in Azure using ARM templates? In this blogpost Pascal's shares his experiences and shows you a really good alternative.

Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams

Jesse Houwing - October 29, 2018

Read Jesse's blog about physical and digital tools for the agile workspace. Tools that help developers, coaches and trainers to survive in the toughest environments.

Azure Functions Connection Monitoring

Rob Bos - October 29, 2018

Searching to monitor the connection limit on AzureFunctions? You are not the only one! Find out where to look by reading Rob's blogpost.

SonarQube setup for Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - October 22, 2018

Rob documented some common gotcha's while installing a new SonarQube server and using it from an Azure DevOps build, after running into and fixing them for a customer.

How to create an Event Grid Subscription to an Azure Function V2

Marco Mansi - October 17, 2018

In this blogpost Marco shows how to create an Event Grid subscription to an Azure Function with an Event Grid Trigger in the V2 Runtime.

Python on Azure Functions – Round 2

Reinier van Maanen - October 15, 2018

A couple of months ago Python support for Azure Functions wasn't up to par with C# support. A lot can happen in a couple of months, so Reinier gave it another try to see if things matured...

Distribute your blessed ARM templates with Universal Packages in Azure DevOps

René van Osnabrugge - October 11, 2018

There is a fine-grained balance between full autonomy of a team and arranging things on a more central level. When Rene is doing his shifting to Rugged DevOps presentation, he talks about the use of blessed libraries, scripts and templates. There are many situations where you can copy and paste a script or ARM template between Git repositories to obtain the same functionality. Read the full story on Rene's blog.

Running Azure DevOps agents inside your virtual network using ACI

Chris van Sluijsveld - October 9, 2018

At Ignite 2018 Microsoft announced virtual network integration for Azure Container Instances. It is currently possible to use a ACI based Azure DevOps agent to deploy into your private network. This post explains the extra things you have to do to make this possible.

Sending Delivery information to VictorOps from Azure DevOps releases using Bash

Michiel van Oudheusden - September 27, 2018

When you are using an Incident Management alerting tool like Pagerduty or VictorOps, it might be beneficial to notice when your deployment system is performing an action. Like doing a release to your environment. Pretty useful to correlate with an incident coming in. VictorOps has an integration called Delivery Insights. Basically a specific endpoint where third-party tooling can send a specific payload to so it can record a release. VictorOps has GitHub integration, but their Azure DevOps (VSTS) integration is lacking. Luckily we can do this ourself.

Use Carter to create a simple HTTP API in ASPNET Core

Michiel van Oudheusden - September 26, 2018

Creating an HTTP API can be done in multiple ways, but if you are a .NET developer, you most likely will use the ASP.NET Web API framework. In previous versions, this was not always that obvious to use. The MVC framework and the Web API framework were actually two different systems. For example; action filters for one framework did not work for the other framework. With newer versions, this difference was solved by having one integrated system. However, there are other frameworks that allow you to do similar things. It is all a matter of taste what works best for you, your team and the project. In this post, Michiel will show you Carter.

Microsoft DevOps FastTrack & Azure DevOps Migrations

Jasper Gilhuis - September 24, 2018

Recently Jasper completed a very nice project which finished with a migration weekend bringing several TFS collections towards Azure DevOps. In this blogpost Jasper shares his experiences with running the DevOps FastTrack Program as well as his approach on migrating from TFS to Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps Pipeline for GitHub Open Source Projects

Rob Bos - September 10, 2018

Microsoft just announced new Azure DevOps pipelines for GitHub Open Source projects, so Rob had to test them out. Read about it here.

Where to start with DevOps Metrics?

René van Osnabrugge - September 6, 2018

In this post Rene talks about monitoring and metrics. Becoming a autonomous DevOps team, means also that you as a team are responsible to build and run the application. Building an application and running an application are two completely different things, and require different metrics. This post gives some guidance which is, and will never be, complete, but merely meant as a starting point.

Azure error setting up export from Activity Log to Event Hub

Rob Bos - September 5, 2018

Fixing errors while setting up an export from Azure Activity Log to an Event Hub.

GDBC DevOps pipelines in VSTS

Rob Bos - September 3, 2018

In this post, Rob describes how he helped the Global DevOps Bootcamp team with automating build and release pipelines to process the challenge definitions. This cut down on errors in the challenges by providing the GDBC team with feedback about the definitions and then running the templates into production, fully automated.

Combining Azure Service Fabric and Service Bus

Loek Duys - September 2, 2018

To integrate Service Fabric into an existing application landscape, it often makes sense to introduce a queuing mechanism. Read more in Loek's latest blogpost.

Retrieving AppSettings for an App Service with the Fluent SDK

Rob Bos - August 30, 2018

Want to retrieve the AppSettings for an App Service, Function App, Logic App with the Fluent SDK? That's not that forthcoming as you might think! Find out more about this here.

Hosting services in .NET Core console application

Peter Groenewegen - August 25, 2018

Building .NET Core console applications with IHost and HostBuild to take advantage of IHostedService, graceful shutdown, dependency injection, logging, configuration and more.

Canonical URLs in an HTTP API

Michiel van Oudheusden - August 23, 2018

Make sure your endpoints have a canonical URI structure when you are building an HTTP API. How? Read Michiel new blogpost and find out.

Using a self signed certificate on a SonarQube server with VSTS/TFS

Rob Bos - August 23, 2018

Resolving issues with the self-signed certificate in the default ARM template of a SonarQube server while using VSTS/TFS.

VSTS Personal Access Token for an Agent: Revoke after use

Rob Bos - August 22, 2018

Rob shows the best practice of revoking a PAT after using it for setting up an agent.

HttpClient and HttpClientFactory in ASP.NET 2.1

Peter Groenewegen - August 20, 2018

Use the new HttpClientFactory to create HttpClient objects in ASP.NET Core. Learn how to create both Named and Typed HttpClient instances.

Azure Key Vault recover keys, secrets and certificates

Peter Groenewegen - August 15, 2018

When working with Azure Key Vaults, you can still run into the human factor. Peter explains how you can avoid that someone hard deletes your keys.

How to make internal members visible to other assemblies with the new CSPROJ format

Sander Aernouts - August 13, 2018

You probably want to expose your Internals to a test project. In the new CSPROJ-format you no longer have an AssemblyInfo.cs. Sander explains what's the new way to do this.

Getting the latest VSTS Agent Download URL for your account

Jasper Gilhuis - August 10, 2018

Sometimes you need to manually or by script download the latest VSTS agent. But how to get this nice pre-configured package for your Account? Jasper faced this challenge and wrote a script

.NET Core, what is my OS

Peter Groenewegen - August 8, 2018

Cool, I can run .NET Core on Linux... but sometimes I've got some OS specific actions to perform. How can I do that?

Automatically generating API clients on build with NSwag

Sander Aernouts - August 6, 2018

Generating API clients while building your solution? It sounds like magic, but Sander explains that its not that complicated.

Injecting a Scoped service into IHostedService

Peter Groenewegen - August 3, 2018

Peter explains you how to get your background processes running in the right way using ASP.NET Core.

Chocolatey Server in Azure

Rob Bos - August 1, 2018

Setting up a Chocolatey Server takes a few steps. Rob guides you through it.

Kubernetes and Visual Studio Code, an ideal combination

Michiel van Oudheusden - July 30, 2018

Michiel loves the productivity he gains from Visual Studio Code when he manages his Kubernetes cluster. You can find the details in this blogpost.

Run maintenance jobs on Azure SQL

Peter Groenewegen - July 26, 2018

Maintenance on your SQL Azure is important to maintain the health of your database. Peter gives a heads-up.

Provision a VSTS Agent using an ARM Linux Custom Script Extension

Jasper Gilhuis - July 24, 2018

Running a VSTS agent on Linux using ARM is dead simple according to Jasper!

Adding a Team Administrator through the VSTS Rest API

Jasper Gilhuis - July 11, 2018

Jasper created a script containing all the methods and supportive functions.

VSTS Rest API – Hard to find methods

René van Osnabrugge - July 10, 2018

Rene is using the VSTS Rest API quite a lot. "The documentation is great, but not everything is documented or hard to find." In his blogpost, he provides some snippets which you can use to get even more out of the VSTS Rest API.

Automatic notification of the latest AKS version in Azure with an Azure Logic app and an Azure Function

Pascal Naber - July 5, 2018

In this blogpost Pascal explains how to create a serverless solution with Azure Functions and Logic Apps to get notified about new versions of AKS

Durable Functions – The Anatomy of Function Naming

Marc Duiker - June 25, 2018

Naming is crucial to make Function development on Azure easy. But naming isn't easy! Learn in this blogpost the recommended practices.

Global DevOps Bootcamp – Provisioning the workitems

Michiel van Oudheusden - June 25, 2018

As part of the Global DevOps Bootcamp preparations, Michiel provisioned thousands of VSTS accounts with Work Items. You can find his experience report here.

Access XML SOAP services in .NET Core and client certificates (SSL)

Peter Groenewegen - June 25, 2018

Secure connections to SOAP services isn't trivial in .NET Core. Peter explains in detail how you make it happen.

Access dashboard on AKS with RBAC enabled

Pascal Naber - June 18, 2018

After visiting the Dashboard of Kubernetes in AKS you will get warnings because the user visiting the dashboard does not have enough rights. This blogpost tells you how to solve this.

GDBC: DevOps on the Leaderboard

Rob Bos - June 18, 2018

Reflection about the way we used DevOps for the Global DevOp Bootcamp's leaderboard to check the performance and errors during the global event. We used the same tools as all participants around the world where learning to use.

Using Prometheus in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Sander Aernouts - June 12, 2018

Understanding the Prometheus operator, custom resource definitions and kube-prometheus.

Run scheduled background tasks in ASP.NET Core

Michiel van Oudheusden & Peter Groenewegen - June 5, 2018

In the previous blog post called background tasks with ASP.NET Core using the IHostedService Peter described how to use the IHostedInterface for background tasks. In this post, we continue on this subject and add some pointers on how to perform scheduled background tasks.

Deep dive into Windows Server Containers and Docker – Part 3 – Underlying implementation of Hyper-V Containers

Cornell Knulst - April 18, 2018

Read Cornell's blogpost about Hyper-V containers and how this Hyper-V container virtualization layer works.

Run RabbitMQ using Docker Compose with guest user outside localhost

Michiel van Oudheusden - April 5, 2018

In a recent project, we needed to run RabbitMQ as a replacement for our Azure service bus. The Azure SB works fine, but when we wanted to create a local end to end test environment we did not want to have external dependencies. Read more on Michiel's blog.

DevOps and Telemetry: Supporting systems

Rob Bos - April 5, 2018

In this blogpost, Rob explains options to monitor the underlying parts of a SaaS application. This means logging information about the systems that support the application: servers, database, storage and anything that comes with that.

Override docker-compose port numbers

Michiel van Oudheusden - April 4, 2018

When you are using a docker-compose yaml file, you basically describe how your containers need to run and interact with each other. Part of this are the ports that a container need to use. Read Michiel's blogpost and learn more..

Solve Nginx bad gateway with Identity Server and Asp.Net Core on Kubernetes

Chris van Sluijsveld - April 4, 2018

In this blogpost Chris will explain how to configure Nginx Ingress for Kubernetes when running production workloads.

Retrieve an OAuth client token from Azure AD using Runscope

Michiel van Oudheusden - April 3, 2018

Runscope is a great online tool to validate and test API endpoints. For a recent project, we are using it to mimic traffic from an external system that is supposed to submit XML files to our application. The application, however, requires an authorization token with a valid JWT to authenticate and authorize the caller. As there is a lifetime on those tokens, we need to retrieve a new one each time we start a test. Luckily that is not too difficult in Runscope.

Is your AAD account the same as your Microsoft account?

Jesse Houwing - March 28, 2018

If your AAD account is still the same as your Microsoft Account, then you’ve probably seen this question regularly. You may have wondered why it’s asking and you’ve likely chosen the wrong option more than once. Is fear what’s keeping you from breaking them apart? It shouldn’t, as it turns out this has become a lot simpler. How much simpler? Find out…

Fix error on Azure: “the subscription doesn’t have permissions to register the resource provider”

Geert van der Cruijsen - March 22, 2018

In this blogpost Geert gives you 3 options to solve this Azure error which can help you get going again in building great cool stuff on Azure.

Upgrade ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core 2.0 to 2.1-preview1

Peter Groenewegen - March 21, 2018

In this blogpost Peter shows what he had to change and give some tips on how to upgrade.

DevOps and Telemetry: Insights into your application – Part 1

Rob Bos - March 15, 2018

Telemetry is a very important part in the DevOps journey. Without telemetry it's hard to prove anything. Step one should be to get a solid understanding of (a lot of different aspects of) your application. This series of posts will go through Rob's journey in this aspect of DevOps.

Unit testing in Service Fabric can be difficult

Loek Duys - March 6, 2018

In this blogpost you’ll find a description of some of the solutions provided by the open source library named ‘ServiceFabric.Mocks’

Initialize ASP.NET Core 2 with CreateDefaultBuilder, what differs if you run in Development enviroment

Peter Groenewegen - February 27, 2018

In this blogpost Peter explains the two differences when you run your application in a Development environment.

Locating and bulk editing work items in VSTS

Rob Bos - February 26, 2018

In this post Rob explains how he helped a customer moving a lot of work items from one type to another by using a Microsoft libary to talk to Visual Studio Team Services via the REST APIs.

Run background processes with the IHostedService and learn how to inject your services with dependency injection

Peter Groenewegen - February 22, 2018

In this blog Peter introduces the IHostedService and how to avoid common memory leaks when implementing the hosted service.

Secure or Compliant? That is the question!

René van Osnabrugge - February 2, 2018

Compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that organizations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, polices, and regulations.

Persistent Storage and Volumes using Kubernetes on Azure with AKS or Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - January 26, 2018

Many applications hosted in a Docker container need a volume to store data on or to read from. This blogposts shows the most used possibilities to use persistent storage using Kubernetes on Azure.

Introduction to ChatOps

Peter Groenewegen - January 24, 2018

ChatOps is a way of combining and centralizing all the tooling for your team into one shared messaging tool. By centralizing access to your systems to one central messaging tool, you increase transparency, collaboration and productivity of you team.

Algorithmic IT Operations for Microsoft Azure

Joey Compeer - December 14, 2017

As you might already know, StackState shines when it comes to providing a unified view of your Information Technology (IT) landscape. The last couple of years we have seen several businesses transition parts of their IT infrastructure to the cloud. However, only parts of the entire IT infrastructure are migrated to the cloud due to various reasons.

Create a sharded MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB

Marco Mansi - December 13, 2017

During his last project Marco was setting up a Release Pipeline in VSTS and one of the steps was to create a Sharded MongoDB in Cosmos DB.

Set Buildnumber from Inline Powershell

Peter Groenewegen - December 12, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Set the buildnumber.

Set progess in Inline Powershell task

Peter Groenewegen - December 12, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Set progress.

Let your Inline Powershell task fail

Peter Groenewegen - December 8, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Let your task fail.

Use VSTS Variables Inline powershell

Peter Groenewegen - December 8, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Use VSTS Variables.

Set custom timeout for code first Migrations Entity Framework (Core 2.0)

Peter Groenewegen - December 5, 2017

Sometimes a migration takes more time then your default timeout of your database connection. In such a case you do want to increase the timeout for the migration to be able to complete, but you do not want to change the timeout for your normal operations.

Add Index with Include Entity Framework (Core 2.0)

Peter Groenewegen - December 4, 2017

When creating indexes with code first migrations in Entity Framework Core 2.0 you can create an index on a table by adding the following to your DbContext:

Handling settings and Environment Variables of your .NET Core 2 application hosted in a Docker container during development and on Kubernetes (Helm to the resque)

Pascal Naber - November 29, 2017

You have developed a microservice in .NET Core 2 and want to host it as a Docker Container in Kubernetes. Your Microservice contains settings, some appsettings or connectionstrings for example. These settings differ over environments. You can treat this configuration for Kubernetes on different ways. This blogpost shows you how to handle settings over environments prepared for Continuous Delivery.

Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus and Grafana

Chris van Sluijsveld - November 23, 2017

When running workloads on Kubernetes in Azure you probably want some insights in how your cluster and pods are behaving. In this blogpost Chris will setup Prometheus and Grafana to get a dashboard going. Lets start with deploy the configuration for Prometheus.

Setting up Sonatype Nexus 3 as your Windows Docker Container Registry

René van Osnabrugge - November 23, 2017

A customer of René uses Sonatype Nexus as their artifact repository for all kinds of packages and also for Docker Containers. Since there are a few Microsoft .Net teams are moving towards Docker, the need for Docker containers arose as well.

Azure Functions Tips: Grouping Functions into Function Apps

Marc Duiker - November 22, 2017

Earlier today Marc read a tweet where a developer wasn’t sure when to group several Azure Functions in one Function App. The Azure Function engineers responded swiftly and they’ll extend the official docs with some guidelines in this area soon. Marc thinks this is a really interesting topic so let’s start with a few ideas of his own.

Working with multiple Kubernetes Clusters on Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - November 22, 2017

When using multiple Kubernetes clusters on Azure Container Service, people execute the az acs kubernetes get-credentials command every time they need to reconnect to a different cluster. This works, but is not needed. You can do it easier.

Debugging packages from your VSTS Package Management Feed with Visual Studio 2017

Jasper Gilhuis - November 6, 2017

In this blogpost Jasper is going to show you how you can debug packages that reside in a Package Management Feed in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).

Configure Https / TLS / SSL on Kubernetes with Kube-Lego hosted on Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - October 30, 2017

What if you can configure your infrastucture with a process that requests your SSL Certificates automatic. Not only this, but this process registeres the certificates in your infrastructure also. There is more.

ASP.NET Core correct usage of ConfigureAwait with async/await

Peter Groenewegen - October 30, 2017

Lately there was a discussion on when to use ConfigureAwait(true) or ConfigureAwait(false) in ASP.NET Core 2. In the end most of the team, including Peter, had a faulty assumption on how to do this in ASP.NET Core. In this case ASP.NET Core is different from ASP.NET. Good to know if you have to decide on what to use in ASP.NET core.

Configure Ingress on Kubernetes using Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - October 27, 2017

In this blogpost about running a .NET Core 2 application in Kubernetes which can be found here, Pascal is creating a Service to expose the .NET Core 2 Webapi, so the service gets a public IP address.

Cross process Application Insights with Multi-Role Application Map

Peter Groenewegen - October 16, 2017

In this blog posts Peter will explain how to enable Multi Role Application Maps preview, give you different process names and add dependency tracking into your application.

Automate the deployment of .NET Core 2 Docker containers to Kubernetes with Azure Container Service and Azure Container Registry using VSTS

Pascal Naber - September 21, 2017

Read more about the Continuous Delivery of the .NET Core 2 WebAPI application automated in VSTS.

How we containerized our new WordPress website and continuously deliver it on Azure

Roy Cornelissen - September 14, 2017

When we set out to design and build a new website for Xpirit, we knew that we wanted to use WordPress and run it on Azure, using cloud native building blocks, set up continuous delivery and deploy the whole thing as Docker containers.

Talking to Kubernetes from VSTS

Loek Duys - September 13, 2017

In this blogpost Loek will describe how to start running some containers on a Kubernetes cluster by using VSTS. Loek explains how to execute commands and queries on Kubernetes, by using the CLI and by using Tasks.

Run .NET Core 2 Docker images in Kubernetes using Azure Container Service and Azure Container Registry

Pascal Naber - September 12, 2017

This blogpost shows you the bare minimal steps to run .NET Core 2 Docker images in Kubernetes.

Test Azure deployments in your VSTS Release Pipeline

Peter Groenewegen - September 8, 2017

When deploying Azure Resources you want to know if all resources are deployed as expected.

SSH keys on Windows for Kubernetes with Azure Container Service (ACS)

Pascal Naber - September 6, 2017

Running a Linux VSTS Agent on Azure Container Instances

René van Osnabrugge - August 18, 2017

This new Azure service is very promising. Rene talks about this hosted and managed Container cluster.

Automatically retain a VSTS release

Jasper Gilhuis - July 24, 2017

Retain a release automatically after it has been succesfully enrolled to an environment by utilizing the PowerShell task to minimize the effort.

Setting up Continuous delivery for Azure API management with VSTS

Geert van der Cruijsen - July 24, 2017

In this blogpost Geert explains how you can set up Continuous delivery of your API definitions in Azure API management including the actual API implementation in Azure Web apps using VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services)

Error during CreateContainer: failure in a Windows system call: No hypervisor is present on this system

Cornell Knulst - July 18, 2017

Cornell explains the reason for this error message and let you know how to solve the issue.

Installing the Python Azure SDK on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Marc Duiker - July 16, 2017

During the summer holiday Marc has been working on a hobby project which involves a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pi camera module. Part of the solution is uploading the pictures the Pi takes to the cloud, Microsoft Azure to be more specific.

Session videos to watch from Build 2017 for Mobile developers

Geert van der Cruijsen - July 5, 2017

Geert created a list of all things relevant for (Xamarin) mobile developers ranging from the new Xamarin announcements that made the headlines to some other sessions that you might have missed but can be relevant for mobile developers.

Log4Net Troubleshooting

Peter Groenewegen - July 4, 2017

This article explains the basic log4net troubleshooting and most common solutions.

Deploying a Docker Composed Application on Service Fabric

Chris van Sluijsveld - June 14, 2017

In this post, Chris Sluijsveld will explain what you have to do to get this running.

The (r)evolution of cloud computing

Martijn van der Sijde - May 4, 2017

Martijn wrote a comprehensive post about the various flavours and trends in cloud computing. Check it out!

Solve Docker firewall error in Windows

Marco Mansi - May 3, 2017

Read how Marco solved an error that prevented volume sharing between Windows and his Docker containers.

Using VSTS Package Management as a private Chocolatey Gallery

René van Osnabrugge - May 2, 2017

Learn from René how to use VSTS Package Management as a private Chocolatey gallery.

14 extensions to enrich your daily VSTS usage

Jasper Gilhuis - May 2, 2017

Jasper posted this list of plugins. In his words: "I find them convenient and they help me to get the most out of VSTS. The list below is primarily focussed on the Work and Code area and not so much on the Build and Release area."

The first Global DevOps Bootcamp

René van Osnabrugge - April 25, 2017

As a fanatic DevOps adept, René wanted to organise a Bootcamp event around DevOps to make people familiar with the subject. And…he is proud to present that on June 17^th, the first Global DevOps Bootcamp will be held at various locations around the globe.