Service Fabric and Application Insights - azure-service-fabric

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.
Add the watchdog app and watchdog service into your solution.
Add your Azure App ID in the WatchDogService -PackageRoot/Config/ServiceManifest.xml
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);
}
}
}
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

Answer 4

For sending application/service telemetry to Application Insights, I strongly recommend you have a look at App Insights Service Fabric. It works great for:
Sending error and exception info
Populating the application map with all your services and their dependencies (including database)
Reporting on app performance metrics, as well as,
Tracing service call dependencies end-to-end,
Integrating with native as well as non-native SF applications
One thing however that the above won't solve is providing overall cluster health information - e.g. when/how often nodes go up/down, how much CPU/Memory and disk IO is consumed on individual nodes.
When running in Azure, the above should be fairly simple and I recommend you start here.
Doing this on-premise is not quite as simple. For this you could try MS EventFlow, or some of the other solutions already mentioned above.
Personally, I ended up creating a simple/custom windows service that use standard App Insights nuget packages to report the following info:
Cluster and Node ETW events from the Service Fabric Operational ETW channel
Performance counters (configurable via app insights config file)