Are you a Student Azure Developer? I bet You've not heard of KUDU Console!

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A lot of student Azure developers I know of are not familiar with KUDU console. KUDU console is a website utility or tool that can be accessed by navigating to {yoursite}.scm.azurewebsites.net and log in with your credentials (site level or user level whichever works in your scenario)


Why KUDU?

Why is KUDU helpful? Because it provides you, the developer, an insight into what’s happening behind the scene (your website, containing VM and website hosting process).

You can look into diagnostic logs, collect memory dumps, view configuration parameters, logs, connection strings and path variables. You may also view the process (W3WP say) hosting your website in scenarios where you want to see how much memory the underlying process is utilizing and it can help you make decision like logging or resetting the website. This is where the concept of Autohealing comes to mind.

Auto Healing

Auto Healing refers to the ability of websites to trigger an action (usually recycle the worker process, log an event or run a custom action) given a particular condition is met. Actions could be,

  • The website receives more than specified number of requests in a given time

  • The website encounters particular error code more than a specific limit

  • The website request process time starts increasing and reaches your defined limit

  • The underlying process of website start consuming memory greater than defined threshold 

Implementing Auto Healing using KUDU

KUDU makes Autohealing lot simpler. Simply log onto KUDU by navigating to {yoursite}.scm.azurewebsites.net

- Tools > Support

- Select Mitigate

- Turn on Autoheal checkbox

- Select your desired condition (I’m demonstrating use of Max Requests in given time using dummy values)

 

- Specify required parameters and Add rule. Now click on Action

 

- Choose your desires Action (I'm using recycle). Make sure you'll have to select Recycle explicitly from dropdown as the default selection didn't work for me.

 

Finally Update to save your settings.