Create a managed application with metrics and alerts

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If this is your first time learning about Azure managed applications, please visit:

This sample shows how you can author a service catalog managed application definition that will allow to deploy a managed application with defined metrics and alerts. This managed application will contain single storage account as a resource, expose application metrics for the storage account including availability, success E2E latency, transactions; as well as alerts based on storage account availability and activity log alerts based on regenerating storage account keys.

This sample template combines two steps:

  1. Deploys a service catalog managed application definition.
  2. Deploys a managed application using deployed application definition.

In a production environment a typical scenario would deploy the application definition and application instance as separate steps. The definition is deployed once and the application many times. In this sample the two steps are combined to make it easy to quickly see the final result of those steps.

Once you deploy this sample template, navigate to the deployed managed application. The Application Overview contains a header and description of the application.

Portal View

This view is driven by the viewDefinition.json file from the application definition package. The Overview is defined by the "kind" propert when set to "Overview". Values for the header and description shown as a default overview experience. To learn more about View definition please visit:

Click managed resource group in managed application overview.

Portal Essentials

You'll see a storage account created inside the resource group. Click "Show hidden types" and you'll see that actually resource group contains an action group and two alert rules. These resources are deployed using the Azure Resource Manager Template mainTemplate.json from the application definition package.

App Resource Group

This sample mainTemplate.json specifies deployment of the action group, metric alert rule and activity log alert rule in addition to storage account deployment.

To learn more about Azure alerts, please visit:

To learn more about Azure Resource Manager templates best practices please visit:

This sample application definition creates an application with the lock level set to "None", so you'll be able to access resources in managed resource group. Go to the managed resource group, go to storage account and perform some blob operations to generate some transactions. Also go to "Access keys" and regenerate storage account key(s).

Go back to the application and select the Alerts menu. You'll be able to see that this application has two alert rules:

  • Metrics alert rule: if the Availability metric for the storage account is greater than 0
  • Activity log alert rule: if storage account key was regenerated

It may take a moment to propagate, but because you performed blob operations and regenerated the storage account key, you'll see Alerts raised for your application.

Portal Alerts

Now click on the Metrics menu item. The application is exposing three metrics: Transactions, Availability and Success E2E latency for the application storage account. Because you performed blob operations with the storage account you'll see data is flowing into the metric graphs.

Portal Metrix

The metrics view is driven by the viewDefinition.json file from the application definition package. Metrics are defined by the "kind" property and the "Metrics" element. You can use any metric supported by your application's Azure resource to expose an application metric. You see different views: bar chart, line chart etc for better visualization. You can drill down into each metric that you are interested in and explore more using Azure Metrics Explorer capabilities.

To learn more about supported metrics, please visit:

To learn more about View definition please visit:

Tags: Microsoft.Solutions/applicationDefinitions, Microsoft.Solutions/applications, Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts, Microsoft.Insights/actionGroups, Microsoft.Insights/metricAlerts, Microsoft.Insights/activityLogAlerts