How to monitor Azure App Service content changes and publishing activity

There are various ways to deploy an Azure App Service content: FTP, GitHub actions, deploy from Zip and many others. With Azure Role-Based Access Control it is possible to have many different users with contributor access who can deploy new content or modify existing files. In those situations it may be important to track who made the content changes and when. Some companies or businesses may need this capability for various compliance requirements. This blog post explains how to enable the monitoring of app service content publishing activity and content file changes.

Azure App Service is integrated with Azure Monitor which makes many app service logs available in Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics. The publishing activity and file change logs are also pushed to Azure Monitor and can be exported to third party services or can be used to create rule-based alerts.

Here are the configuration steps necessary to enable publishing activity and file change logging.

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Using ARM template to swap App Service deployment slots

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are used to automate deployment and configuration of Azure resources. With the templates you can define the infrastructure to be deployed via a JSON file and then use that file to repeatedly deploy new resources or update existing ones. ARM templates are widely used to release new versions of the Azure web apps and function apps. During a release the new version of an app is deployed to a staging slot and then it is swapped into production. This blog post explains how to automate the App Service deployment slot swap operation with an ARM template.

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Azure App Service Deployment Slots Tips and Tricks

This post explains some of the not so well-known features and configurations settings of the Azure App Service deployment slots. These can be used to modify the swap logic as well as to improve the application availability during and after the swap. Here is what you can do with them:

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Using Azure Activity Log to check the progress of deployment slots swap operation

If you use Azure Web App Deployment Slots then you may have noticed that sometimes the swap action may take a while to complete. This may happen when an application that is being swapped into production has a long warmup/initialization phase. It has to be warmed up on every VM in an App Service Plan and that sometimes takes minutes (more detailed description of what happens during the swap can be found in Most common deployment slot swap failures and how to fix them). This blog post explains how to see the progress and the result of the swap operation in the Azure Activity Log.

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Most common deployment slot swap failures and how to fix them

Azure Web App Deployment Slots are used to deploy new versions of an application code into production with no interruption to the production traffic. In order to achieve this the swap process involves multiple steps that are performed to prepare the new version of the code to successfully handle the load once it is in production slot. Some of these steps may go wrong, especially when the new version of the code does not cooperate well. This in turn either causes the swap to fail or it results in swapping new code in production while it is still not ready to handle the production load. This post describes the most common reasons why this may happen and how to correct them.

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Using Powershell to manage Azure Web App Deployment Slots

This blog post has been updated from its original version in order to use the correct names of the PowerShell cmdlets.

This blog post explains how to perform common management tasks for Azure Web App deployment slots by using Powershell cmdlets. To learn more about deployment slots refer to the Azure documentation and my previous blog posts: Azure Web App Deployment Slot Swap with Preview and How to warm up Azure Web App during deployment slots swap.

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