In Application Insights, you can create an availability web testing to monitor the availability of a web application. It supports 2 type of testing:
URL ping test: a simple test that you can create in the Azure portal.
Multi-step web test: which you create in Visual Studio Ultimate or Visual Studio Enterprise and upload to the portal.
Normally it is easy to setup ping test and multiple step testing against a public site.
However, in order to have a multiple step testing against an ADFS federated application, you will have to do some extra in order to take care of the authentication part.
Application Insight is a great tool for monitoring your application. However, there is a limitation regarding historical data: Regardless the different plans, you can only have:
7 days raw data, includes access to all telemetry data points collected by application insights
90 days aggregated data, includes access to telemetry data points aggregated at hourly/daily levels
This article will demonstrate how to use the continuous data export to overcome this limitation, as well as use PowerBI for future web analytic.
For enabling the continues deployment from VSTS to Azure, e.g. provision the environment and deploy code, you must create connection between VSTS project and Azure subscription. It should be done in individual project and not in the VSTS top level. Therefore, each project can connect to different Azure subscription.
It contains two main parts, and normally you need both of them
Connect Azure Classic (for deploying your application code)
Connect Azure Resource Manager (for provisioning your environment)
Previously we have setup and published the hexo-based blog. The article source code and the hexo configuration files are under git version control.
Config theme, the wrong way
As most hexo tutorials, the next step is to change the default theme. There are lots of themes that you can choose from. However, most of the theme simply ask you to clone itself under the themes folder.
In this case, we will use the popular theme NexT. Its document specified follow below steps:
For most of themes (including NexT), we will have to modify the theme’s _config.yml file which is under the theme folder, in order to:
change the configuration on the theme level, such change theme style
update personal information
setup Google Analytic key
integrate with 3rd party commenting plugin
future customize the theme the way you want
Naturally, you would like to have above modifications also under version control, so you check them in and push to Git.
Now, if you head to Github source code page, you will find an interesting grayed-out folder named “Next” You also lost the possibility to browse the theme source code there.
Hexo is a simple and powerful blog framework that allows you setup your blog quickly and easily.
Why Hexo?
Instead of create the blog in https://wordpress.com/, I decided to setup and own the whole blog website. You can read a good discussion by Avinash Kaushik.
However, own a web site on interent is not easy. Normal maintenance tasks, such as backup database (your content) and apply security patch, are too much to a part-time blogger. Therefore, Hexo became a good solution:
Customization: Hexo and its components are open-source. You can customize your blog the way you want.
Light-weight: Hexo is a static blog system. It does not require any server-side code, or a database. Git is the best mechanism.
Safety: Hexo only publish static files to internet, such as html, css and javascript. It is much less vulnerable compares to any rumtime web application.
No compromise on functionality: Even it is a static site, but you can still embed 3rd party services for common blog functionalities such as commenting and web analytic.
Cost: Together with Github page, host your blog is free. If you are not a fan of the yourname.github.io domain name, you can also pay a little to have your own domain.
