Service Fabric and Application Insights

Question

I am new to service Fabric and trying to integrate my windows service application into service fabric. For logging information, we are planning to use Application Insights. But the events are not logged if i send it through my SF application. At the same time, through a normal console/windows application, I can able to log the message to applicationinsights and can be viewed from there.

Then I tried to create a VM in azure environment, and create SF application there and send the log information to AI and its worked successfully. I copied the same codebase into my local machine and run it, its not working. I am not sure whether its related to any firewall or proxy settings. Can anyone help on this?

I have used the nuget package to install Microsoft.ApplicationInsights dll in my machine. The version that I used is 2.2.0. And I am using .Net framework 4.6.1

Answer 1

You could look at EventFlow to help you capture Service Fabric ETW Events from your SF services and send them to Application Insights.

It's easy enough to setup, simply add Microsoft.Diagnostics.EventFlow.ServiceFabric NuGet to your Service Fabric service project and then setup a pipline

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    try
    {
        using (var diagnosticsPipeline = ServiceFabricDiagnosticPipelineFactory.CreatePipeline("MyApplication-MyService-DiagnosticsPipeline"))
        {
            ServiceRuntime.RegisterServiceAsync("MyServiceType", ctx => new MyService(ctx)).Wait();

            ServiceEventSource.Current.ServiceTypeRegistered(Process.GetCurrentProcess().Id, typeof(MyService).Name);

            Thread.Sleep(Timeout.Infinite);
        }
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        ServiceEventSource.Current.ServiceHostInitializationFailed(e.ToString());
        throw;
    }
}

In your eventflow.config you can then setup Application Insights as an output:

{
    "inputs": [
        {
            "type": "EventSource",
            "sources": [
                 { "providerName": "Your-Service-EventSource" }
           ]
        },
    ],
    "filters": [
        {
            "type": "drop",
            "include": "Level == Verbose"
        }
    ],
    "outputs": [
        // Please update the instrumentationKey.
        {
            "type": "ApplicationInsights",
            "instrumentationKey": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
        }
    ],
    "schemaVersion": "2016-08-11",
    "extensions": []
}

Answer 2

An alternative to the EventFlow approach suggested by yoape would be Azure Diagnostics (WAD).

Setup WAD in SF VMSS

When you're running an Azure Service Fabric cluster, it's a good idea to collect the logs from all the nodes in a central location. Having the logs in a central location helps you analyze and troubleshoot issues in your cluster, or issues in the applications and services running in that cluster. One way to upload and collect logs is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics (WAD) extension, which uploads logs to Azure Storage, and also has the option to send logs to Azure Application Insights or Event Hubs. You can also use an external process to read the events from storage and place them in an analysis platform product, such as OMS Log Analytics or another log-parsing solution.

Setup AI upload in WAD

Cloud services, Virtual Machines, Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Service Fabric all use the Azure Diagnostics extension to collect data. Azure diagnostics sends data to Azure Storage tables. However, you can also pipe all or a subset of the data to other locations using Azure Diagnostics extension 1.5 or later. This article describes how to send data from the Azure Diagnostics extension to Application Insights.

The nice thing about it is that it's completely managed by Azure, and you don't need to change anything in your project.

Answer 3

You can adapt the watchdog Service from Microsoft Samples. The watchdog Service is a generic standalone Service Fabric Stateful Service that will log data into Application Insights.

1. Add the watchdog app and watchdog service into your solution.
2. Add your Azure App ID in the WatchDogService -PackageRoot/Config/ServiceManifest.xml
3. In the service that you need monitored, in the Run Async command, add the following lines (Example is in the Test Stateless Service provided in the link below)

Code:

 protected override async Task RunAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        // Register the health check and metrics with the watchdog.
        bool healthRegistered = await this.RegisterHealthCheckAsync(cancellationToken);
        bool metricsRegistered = await this.RegisterMetricsAsync(cancellationToken);

        while (true)
        {
            // Report some fake metrics to Service Fabric.
            this.ReportFakeMetrics(cancellationToken);
            await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30), cancellationToken);

            // Check that registration was successful. Could also query the watchdog for additional safety.
            if (false == healthRegistered)
            {
                healthRegistered = await this.RegisterHealthCheckAsync(cancellationToken);
            }
            if (false == metricsRegistered)
            {
                metricsRegistered = await this.RegisterMetricsAsync(cancellationToken);
            }
        }
    }

4. Copy the RegisterHealthCheckAsync, RegisterMetricsAsync and ReportFakeMetrics methods, as is, into your service.cs file.

That should be it! It uses Azure Storage optionally. I did not have to implement that to get the watchdog up and running.

Here is the link : https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-watchdog-service