Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) Plugging a gap in Azure Application Insights
We’ve heard a lot about Low-Code, No-Code recently. Great summation on the topic here from Adam Burden.
If you’ve been around for as long as I have you may be thinking ‘Oh no, here we go again’ with thoughts back to many cycles of failed point and click construction tools; or the promise of web service orchestration products that never quite got there.
So I thought, ok .. let’s give it (yet) another go.
Problem Space
An application I manage logs events to Azure Application Insights. App Insights itself is a no-code implementation of a different kind. When issues do occur all the great data is in Application Insights but my team wants to manage these as Bug work items in Azure DevOps.
App Insights does allow you to create a work item via integration but it is a little clunky, a little unreliable and takes a lot of effort. What I wanted to do was automatically create a AzDO Bug when an exception is logged in Application Insights.
Introducing Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate is the latest in a long line of integration products from Microsoft. To put it simply, they’ve taken the power of BizTalk and whacked an If-This-Then-That style simplified interface on top.
The result is a very usable and extremely powerful platform.
Disclosure: I’m lucky in that my company has enabled this for all employees so we can create all kinds of wonderous stuff. This also includes access to the premium connectors (at no cost to me) and we have company wide integration via Azure Active Directory (♥ Avanade).
I had tried this exact flow a year ago but now we have new connectors and a better interface, what was very difficult to do before is super easy now.
App Insights to Azure DevOps Flow
This is the final flow. As you can see it is super simple, made up of only two connectors and a couple of standard shapes:
Recurrence. Ok so I originally wanted this to be event driven but that requires some configuration on the App Insights side and in reality I don’t need to know the very second something happens. Each hour is fine. But if I wanted to I could configure an Alert in App Insights to call a web hook that would his an endpoint I would create in here.
Run Analytics Query. This is the Application Insights connector and it saves having to mess around with the ODATA/REST APIs. Here I just provide the query to get all the 500 exceptions in the past hour.
The Apply to each shape allows me to iterate though a collection and perform actions on each of the values.
The Create a work item shape is the Azure DevOps connector. Like the App Insights connector this has been greatly simplified and allows me to select organizations and projects I have access to. I provide a decent title and description and not shown above, I provide a direct link to the event on App Insights.
Result
The result is a nice list of exception in Azure DevOps that corelates to the same list in App Insights.
The whole exercise took about 20 minutes and it has greatly improved the productivity of my team. Now all we have to do is fix those darn bugs!
But just looking at the very long list of connectors; there are so many other ways I’m going to get value out of this new service.
