Introduction

• 4 minutes

It's essential to continuously monitor application components of a mission-critical workload so that you can observe performance degradation early and avoid outages.

A well-designed application health model gives you that capability by using metrics and thresholds, which you consider important for the workload. Through optimized queries and visualizations, you can quickly identify the cascading impact of degraded system components and troubleshoot problems before an outage can occur.

Example scenario

Two years ago, after migrating from an on-premises environment to the cloud, Contoso Shoes saw improvements in operations. However, keeping its availability and uptime within its service-level agreement continued to be a challenge for the company. Some product launches resulted in outages because the system couldn't meet the demands of increased user load.

To prevent further avoidable outages, Contoso Shoes successfully applied the design principles of a mission-critical workload in its main customer-facing web application, the store website.

As Contoso Shoes prepares for its next high-profile product launch, the company identifies a gap in awareness of the health and availability of its web application. Employees use this application to update the product catalog. Their customers interact with the catalog through the store website. Traffic is expected to increase during the launch and insufficient monitoring and knowledge about application health, is a potential risk.

In this module, you use this web application as the core example. The exercises cover these tasks:

• Design a multi-layered health model structure for the application.
• Build a health model and visualize observability data in an operational dashboard.
• Design queries and a health endpoint in the application to check its health and dependencies at the API level.