Configuring, scaling, and monitoring Web Apps
Now that
you’ve created a web app, assigned it to an App Service plan, and deployed it,
let’s take a look at the configuration in the portal and how to scale your web
application.
Configuring
Web Apps
Log into
the Azure portal and go to the web application you created and deployed from
Visual Studio earlier. The primary blade should look like Figure 2-25.
Figure
2-25 Web App
blade.
The
Essentials section
Let’s
start with the icons across the top of the Web App blade and look at what they
are used for.
Settings
This opens a new blade called Settings. This displays by default when you
first
open the Web App blade, and is the same blade you see when you click All
Settings.
Tools This opens the Tools blade, which provides access to Performance
testing, Process Explorer, Performance monitoring, and so on. It also provides
access to the Kudu console, which is helpful for troubleshooting and analysis.
Browse This opens your web app in your default browser.
Stop/Start This option starts and stops the web app.
Swap This option swaps the versions deployed to two different deployment
slots. For example, if you have a production slot and a staging slot, you can
publish your web app to staging and test it. When you’re satisfied with it, you
can promote it to production by using the Swap option. When you’re sure
everything is working okay, you can remove the staging version.
Restart This restarts your web app.
Delete
This removes the web app.
Get Publish Profile This retrieves the information needed
to publish a web app from Visual Studio.
Reset Publish
Profile This resets the publishing credentials and invalidates the old
credentials. These credentials are used for FTP and Git access.
In the Essentials
area, it shows the settings provided when creating the web app: the Resource
Group, Location, Azure Subscription ID, the URL of the website, and the name of
the App Service plan being used. It also shows the credentials for FTP’ing into
the web app in case you want to deploy new files via FTP.
Click Settings to
open the Settings blade. Let’s take a closer look at some of the options on
this blade.
The
Settings blade: General
Figure 2-26 shows the
General section of the Settings blade.
Figure 2-26 General section on the web
app’s Settings blade
Let’s take
a look at the General settings we can configure on this blade.
Quick Start This brings up some resources you can use to learn more
about Web Apps. There are links to install Visual Studio and the Microsoft
Azure SDK, links to reset your deployment credentials, and links to tutorials,
forums, samples, etc.
Properties This shows some of the same values that are in the Essentials
blade: the URL, the mode (Standard), the outbound IP addresses, the FTP
settings, and so on.
Application
Settings These are values that apply to your web app.
The top of
the Application Settings blade shown in Figure 2-27 lets you set things like
the .NET Framework version, PHP version, etc. Figure 2-27 Application Settings
blade for the web app.
Let’s look
at what some of these settings are used for:
.NET
Framework Version If your web app is a .NET application, this will denote
the
PHP, Java, and Python Versions If using one of these technologies, this
allows you to set the version to be run for the App Service. PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6,
and 7.0 are supported. Java 7 and 8 are supported. For Python, versions 2.7 and
3.4 are supported.
Platform This indicates whether your web app runs on a 32-bit platform
or a 64-bit platform. Note that you cannot select 32-bit for Free websites.
Always On By default, webpages are unloaded after being idle for a
certain amount of time. If you need your webpage to be live and active all of
the time, set this to On.
Debugging
These settings allow you enable and disable remote debugging. If set to On,
you can then select which version of Visual Studio you want to use to perform
the debugging. Be sure to specify the Debug configuration when you publish your
web app if you want to perform remote debugging.
Other
settings farther down this blade include the list of default documents, handler
mappings, and virtual applications and directories.