I habe a web role in azure. It is running fine locally in development app fabric, but fails silently when deployed to Azure (simply no response at all for any request).
I assume it's some problem with the web.config, but that is happening so early that it occurs already before I can set up the diagnostic stuff in global asax. As said, it's working fine locally, but there is simply no response at all from the azure system.
How can I find out what specifically is wrong to be able to solve it like get the exception text, stack trace, IIS application system error log or anything that could hint me to the real problem?
The absolute first thing that is run in a Web role is not your application but the OnStart() method in WebRole.cs in your Azure project. This is the place to add code to monitor your Web site.
The standard technique is to copy your application trace logs and the Windows event logs to Azure table storage, together (if appropriate) with instrumentation for CPU usage, IIS statistics and what-have-you.
A good introduction to this is here: http://blog.bareweb.eu/2011/01/beginning-azure-diagnostics/
and a good followup with details on the specifics you'll need in your application is here: http://blog.bareweb.eu/2011/03/implementing-azure-diagnostics-with-sdk-v1-4/
which remains applicable for the Azure SDK 1.5.
Once you are capturing diagnostics, you can either use Visual Studio to view them directly, or you can use a tool like the Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to graph and filter them automatically. This tool is a little rough around the edges (especially for larger systems with multiple instances: the graphs aren't really useful) but is as good as it gets at the moment.
An alternative approach is to use Remote Desktop to connect to the remote instance and do some spelunking in the Windows event logs and suchlike. You can also use the Internet Explorer browser that's on the remote instance to directly connect locally to the application and see any errors etc. that may otherwise be hidden.
Personally I'd only do this if the diagnostic storage mechanism isn't working: production servers really should have remote desktop access turned off altogether to reduce the possible surface area for external attack.
Setting up diagnostics is the best long term solution to dealing with tracking errors in your application. If you want something a little more ad-hoc you can either catch the errors and write them to blob storage or use your own light weight trace listener.
Related
When one creates an ASP.NET Core Web API in Visual Studio 2022, and tests it locally, one gets a convenient Swagger page built upon an OpenAPI definition, to test all HTTP endpoints.
However, when deployed and trying to access {path-to-api}/swagger, it returns a 404 Not Found error, even while on localhost, when both the API and the database is sitting on my own machine. Even if the database is in the Azure cloud, for that matter, it also works, if I put the Azure SQL Database connection string into appsettings.json.
So is there a way to achieve this, preferably without too much hassle? Or am I wrong in wanting this, do developers mostly test their APIs locally? Because I want the Swagger API online only for testing.
The problem is getting and using the swagger functionality into the cloud. Is it possible and good practice?
If you look at the startup, you will notice that the swagger is only loaded during a development session via an if check. Commenting that out, or expanding it based on evironment, will allow a published version to generate the page on the target host.
if (app.Environment.IsDevelopment())
{
app.UseSwagger();
app.UseSwaggerUI();
}
I generally do that for first publishes or to Dev/Test environments to see it running. Once it is not needed, I un-comment it back in.
Also it may be actually viable (turned on) in Dev or UAT server because one is also publishing the open api it to APIM (Azure api manager), which takes the api and generates its own development environment; away from an initial publish.
Also once published, it is not the default page, one still has to path to it such as .../swagger/index.html.
I'm aborting this mission to deploy the Swagger interface to Azure along with my API. It's bad security practice to make the HTTP request methods so visually available to all. So the answer to my question do developers mostly test their APIs locally, is apparently yes.
I wondered if I should remove the question, but I would like to make it still stand, in case anyone else is contemplating about doing the same thing - exposing an API online with the Swagger UI.
I've been installing our very own ArcGIS Enterprise instance on AWS.
The instance I chose is ArcGIS Enterprise on Ubuntu.
It is important to mention that this installation was conducted without using Cloudbuilder. I know it is a tool that automates the process but I was introduced to it only after I have already started to attack my current instance problems head-on. So, please don't advise me to restart the whole process from scratch using it.
The current status of my instance is that my ArcGIS Server is working. I can access it, upload services and we have already started using it in out Staging environment.
I have authorized all of the software on the server and verified it is licensed. The Portal for ArcGIS is my main problem.
Whenever I try to access it externally(from my office computer) it seems to redirect to the internal IP for some reason, and then times out on that request.
for example typing(from my browser):
https://[dns address]:7443/arcgis/home
redirects to:
https://[internal IP]:7443/arcgis/home
and this times out. (...took too long to respond error)
The funny thing is I can access the portaladmin area.
it's only the portal itself which doesn't work.
Also, another curious thing is that if I type without using the ports, I can access a window but exceptions are thrown in the browser.
For example:
https://[dns address]/arcgis
This will lead to a window where the ArcGIS world icon can be seen but nothing else loads and there are exceptions for "resource not found" 404 on some of the components of this page.
Any ideas? What further information should I include to answer this question?
I've looked everywhere but Esri's documentation is not very forthcoming with examples and information to understand what it is I did wrong.
Also, I don't think this is a ArcGIS software issue. It looks like this might be a proxy issue. Anyone else experienced something like this?
Thanks!
I found the solution.
It was a combination of two problems:
Tomcat that was running the web adaptor service was crashing because of an entirely different and unrelated issue.
The Portal was missing a web adaptor configuration and therefore did not have the WebContext property set with the web adaptor URL.
After fixing both of these problems, I was able to access the portal correctly.
I'm planning to do an automated deployment of a website,but im kind of stuck at this moment. I have looked at MS-Deploy, it got all the functions for deploying Website. I have a created a Web application package (.ZIP file) and I tested this on my local machine it is deploying website i.e
Create Web application under default website
Publishing files in c:\inetpub\wwwroot directory
Set ACLs on directories,etc
But i want to achieve few more extra steps for example:
Check whether Web application exists in Default Website, if not
create a Web application
Check whether Application pool exists, if not create a App pool
(given name) with a specific credentials and Assign App-pool to Web
application
Before it deploys take a backup copy of existing Web application (IF
exists)
publish offline page (app_offline.htm)
publishing the files to application directory
Replace the AppSettings section(in web.config file) to with actual values
Encrypt Web.config connection string
If there is any error whilst installing web application, rollback the web application to its previous version
The question is whether can i achieve all these functions via MS-Deploy or do i need to write any script, please suggest me what scripting language should i use
Please let me know if you need more information.
Thanks in advance
I'm not an expert on this topic but have been doing a bit of research on automated deployment with MSDeploy lately, and think I can offer the following;
This is default behaviour if you use the iisApp provider.
I know you can do this with the appPoolConfig provider, but I'm unsure as to how you would run this and #1 together as part of the same package. Perhaps as part of a pre- or post-sync command?
This is standard in v3, as long as it's set up on the server. Not used it myself, but read this anyway.
Fiddly. Not supported in MSDeploy, but you can vote for it if you want. Also, check out this SO answer (and also worth checking out PackageWeb, but the same answers' author).
Not sure I follow. This is done as part of a successful deployment, surely?
Use web.config transforms and optionally the aforementioned PackageWeb for a neat way to do this. Also check out Web Publish Profiles.
Difficult. My understanding is that the encryption is based on the machine.config, so you'd either have to run a post-sync script which would run some sort of remote Powershell script on the remote server to encrypt the web.config using aspnet_regiis, or you'd have to encrypt the config as part of your build process and then muck about with custom keys and the RSA provider (some info here).
I hope that helps. As I said, I'm no expert, so happy to be corrected by those more knowledgeable. Maybe also worth mentioning that MSDeploy is a lot more powerful if you use it via the command-line rather than creating packages from VS, although there is a bit of a learning curve to go with it.
What is currently the "best" way to develop a back-end system in Azure Mobile Services?
Specifically, what tools are available? From what I've seen, most examples just go to the Management portal and manually add a few lines into the script window. This is worse than using just Notepad, and doesn't have any concept of version control...
Is there any way to make a project in VS 2012 that contains all the Node.js code that will run in the Azure Mobile service? Is there a way of fully running that code on a local development environment that mimics the Mobile Services?
I need to have server-side code with much more complexity than is shown in most of the Mobile Services samples or documentation that I've been able to find.
I have a web site, and a Win 8 Store App that need to authenticate against, and access relatively complex data structures from a back-end database. The solution being pushed right now all seem to include Mobile Services at the center of it, using simple REST against raw tables, but all the examples are too simple to be useful.
Can someone point me to a "real-life" sample of using Mobile Services, and a "mature" way of developing and testing such a system using the tools in Visual Studio?
Thanks.
Why you have no other option than the Management portal is really beyond me. It seems very awkward for a C#/.NET developer to go back to Notepad style programming with console.log() debugging.
What I would love to see is some Node.js entry points that you could connect to a regular C# assembly which could fulfill the request (as in ASP.NET MVC or Web API) having the full .NET Framework at your disposal.
What I could see as a possible architecture is to have:
ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure
--- writes processed data with logic to --->
Azure SQL DB <--- reads from --- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
Or
Cloud Worker Role on Azure ---- crunching/processing ----> Azure SQL DB <---- reading/writing raw data ---- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
You can use the Mobile Services facility for mobile devices facilities, scheduling and push notifications with limited code and do most of the coding in a managed .NET environment.
The AMS (Azure Mobile Services) along with Azure has advanced dramatically since this post was written and the replied answers.
Some of this stuff still holds true. If you have a ton of node.js written not in the Azure cloud portal, you will want to copy and paste to the portal online, custom api calls section and even perhaps sql backend tables for CRUD operations.
The hope for C# developers is that it is NOW in preview mode in which YOU CAN skip node.js and build everything without node.js very shortly... Some bugs to work out, but in 6 months this will be fairly solid.
I had questions and issue and a guy named Carlos carlosfigueira was very helpful.
Azure Mobile Services - Getting more user information
Josh covers unit testing server-scripts here: http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Unit_testing_Mobile_Services_scripts_Day_7_.aspx
In this tutorial, he uses the Mocha testing framework for JS (id TDD mode) and walks through an example for testing an INSERT script that encrypts the value of a particular property (text) and a read script that decrypts it (value is encrypted at rest in SQL db).
You can also find aggregation of links and tutorials here.
I would suggest that you build this solution using Windows Azure Mobile solutions especially it supports the Node JS NPM right now, which means you can create the API you want on the Windows Azure using the Node JS NPM and can work with it using WAMS easily. have a look on the following link it will help you understand what I want to say more.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/14/windows-azure-major-updates-for-mobile-backend-development.aspx
For the Client I also suggest that you build it using SignalR which is designed for cases such yours where real time applications require a lot of transactions from the server side.
http://www.asp.net/signalr
you can also find more details about how you can integrate both of them in the following link: http://hhaggan.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/signalr-node-js/
I hope these help you, let me know if you need anything else.
For running locally, the mobile service has the same Kudu environment available in azure websites, so you can browse to https://your_service_name.scm.azure-mobile.net If you navigate to the Debug Console from the top nav, you can download everything running in the site/wwwroot folder.
You can run this nodejs project locally (On windows only if you require the SQL Server npm package). Your code is in App_Data/config/scripts. If you replace the downloaded content with your current local git working copy, you can develop and debug locally, and then push changes as usual.
Tools I use:
Eclipse with JS environment (or any nodejs IDE).
Git
Postman
Steps:
Enable source control to your azure mobile service.
Pull to your local and create a eclipse project with the source.
Make changes and push.
Test with POSTman
This procedure allows me to develop really fast and eclipse tell me the common JS errors. But it has obvious downside:
No debugging (I use console.log)
The project ended up with a lot of commits (its hard to use git for proper source control)
I just did a blog post on running Azure Mobile Services locally: http://www.mikelanzetta.com/2014/09/running-azure-mobile-services-locally/ - basically it interrogates the API and starts up express, and allows you to run mocha yourself locally. It's a bit cleaner than pulling down the full wwwroot from the scm link, and I found using my local runner as a git submodule made it easy to work with (and easy for me to use VSO for managing my tests).
Anyway, for actual development, I use the Git integration and WebStorm - it automatically figures out the tasks in my local Gruntfile and makes it easy to run and test. For once it's deployed, Postman is helpful.
Is there a way to debug (specifically step-through) a Google app engine application that has been deployed to the cloud. The reason I am asking is that there are certain things that either cannot be debugged locally or require work-arounds to test locally (eg. CRON Jobs).
Specifically I want to do this using Eclipse.
Update: as of 2015 it is possible to debug AppEngine Java applications if they run on Managed VMs. Also, the debugger is a web-based hosted debugger - no support yet for your popular IDE. See Cloud Debugger.
No, this can not be done.
One of the reasons why this most probably will never be available is that GAE is a distributed cloud system, where an "application" can have multiple instances running in parallel and there is no guarantee that consequent requests (e.g. a user session) would be served by the same instance. So there would be no way to know to which instance to connect debugger to.
You might want to star this acknowledged bug