Monitoring

Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal provides access to a set of predefined dashboards that enable you to monitor your project key application metrics.
You can monitor predefined and customizable metrics such as resources utilization, traffic, availability, page views, and others.

Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal provides access to application metrics dashboards, where graphical representations of the website usage, reliability and responsiveness are available. To access the dashboard, perform the following:

1. Log in to Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
2. In the left pane, click Overview » Summary.
   The overview of your application opens.
3. Under the Environments section, click the icon in the Metrics column of the respective environment.

Tracked metrics

By default, the Application Metrics dashboard tracks the following items:

• Availability - this metric tracks the average percentage uptime of your production website.
• Unique sessions - this metric provides information about the unique users browsing the website.
• Failed requests - the number of failed requests to your website domain.
• Exceptions - the sum of exceptions your website has thrown during runtime.
• Request Execution Time - how long does it take on average for an ASP.NET request to your website to execute.
• Response time – the average server response time.
• CPU Usage - the average CPU load.
• Available Memory - the average memory load.

Access application insights of your project

You can further drill down your Sitefinity Cloud project application metrics, leveraging the integration with Azure Application Insights. While dashboards present an up-to date snapshot of your application metrics for a predefined period, Application Insights enables you to further review historic data for and monitor your application performance over a specified period.

To view you application insights, you can click the widgets available on the Application Metrics dashboard. This will automatically redirect you to the respective application insights section of the Azure portal. Alternatively, you can login to the Azure portal and navigate to Application Insights. 

The uptime of your website is monitored with health checks configured in Application Insights that run every minute from 5 different locations around the globe. There are three types of health checks:

• Homepage - the homepage health check tests the availability of the website homepage using the main domain.
• Application - the application health checks test the Sitefinity system health by making requests to the Sitefinity Health check service to verify that the application has bootstrapped correctly and can connect to the Azure SQL Database, Azure Redis Cache, and Azure Search services.
• Custom - customers can request for specific URLs to be monitored in addition to the homepage.

The success criteria for each health check are a 200 OK response status code within a 60 seconds timeout period. The timeout for Tier 2 and Tier 3 is 30 seconds, which makes the health checks more sensitive. If the health check fails, it tries again after 20 seconds. If it fails three times in a row for 2 or more locations around the globe within a 5 minute interval, an incident is automatically triggered and the Sitefinity Cloud On-Call team is engaged to resolve the issue.

You can track the overall availability for your website by opening Application Insights directly through the Azure Portal, or through the View logs link for Production on the Welcome page of Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal. Once you open Application Insights, click Availability from the side menu.

You can track the number of page views and API calls for the current calendar month by opening the Page Views & API Calls link for Production on the Welcome page of Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
You receive an email summary from Sitefinity Cloud once a month, providing a breakdown by month for the values of these two metrics for your current billing period. The billing period is 12 months and starts from the month after your purchase date. Depending on your Sitefinity Cloud Tier, you have a different limit of page views and API calls per month. If you exceeded your page views and API calls limits for the billing period, you will be charged for the overages.

Page views are counted as HTTP requests that match the following criteria:

• Host: must be a Production domain
• Method: GET
• Response code: 200 (OK)
• Bot filter: Likely human (requests that are determined to be from bots are not counted)
• Content type: html
• User agent does not contain "AppInsights" (excludes uptime health checks)
• URL path is not part of Sitefinity Admin UI or media documents

API calls are counted as HTTP requests that match the following criteria:

• Host: must be a Production domain
• Content type: xml OR json
• User agent does not contain "AppInsights" (excludes uptime health checks)
• URL path is not part of Sitefinity system APIs used for Admin UI
  

In addition to the total count of monthly page views and API calls, you can also use KQL to query a breakdown of the data based on the following:

• HTTP method
• HTTP host
• HTTP referrer
• URL path
• Query string

For more information, see Microsoft documentation » KQL quick reference.
The system stores the top 1000 daily results for page views and API calls as SitefinityCloudDailyUsageBreakdown_CL log entries.
To query the data, perform the following:

1. Log in to Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
2. On the Welcome page, click the Page Views & API Calls link for Production environment.
   
3. Run a custom query using the log type SitefinityCloudDailyUsageBreakdown_CL.

Following are sample queries that you can use:

• Pie chart for page views for current month by Host
  
• Pie chart for page views for current month by URL
  
• Pie chart for API calls for current month by Host
  
• Pie chart for API calls for current month by URL
  

The Sitefinity Cloud dashboards, related to the application development and deployment processes, are easily customizable and facilitate focusing on the most important metrics for your project. 

To create a custom dashboard in Azure DevOps, perform the following:

1. On the Dashboards page, click the New Dashboard button.
   The Create a dashboard dialog opens.
2. In Name, enter a name for your new dashboard.
3. In Description, enter a description optionally.
   If you want to have your dashboard refreshed automatically, also select Automatically refresh the dashboard every 5 minutes.
4. Under Dashboard Type, select one of the following options:
   
   • Team Dashboard
   • Project Dashboard
   If you select the Team Dashboard option, you have to associate the dashboard with a single team. To do so, make your selection from the Team dropdown box.
5. Click Create.