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You can monitor Azure Application Gateway resources in the following ways:
Backend health: Application Gateway provides the capability to monitor the health of the servers in the backend pools through the Azure portal and through PowerShell. You can also find the health of the backend pools through the performance diagnostic logs.
Logs: Logs allow for performance, access, and other data to be saved or consumed from a resource for monitoring purposes.
Metrics: Application Gateway has several metrics which help you verify that your system is performing as expected.
Note
We recommend that you use the Azure Az PowerShell module to interact with Azure. See Install Azure PowerShell to get started. To learn how to migrate to the Az PowerShell module, see Migrate Azure PowerShell from AzureRM to Az.
Backend health
Application Gateway provides the capability to monitor the health of individual members of the backend pools through the portal, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI). You can also find an aggregated health summary of backend pools through the performance diagnostic logs.
The backend health report reflects the output of the Application Gateway health probe to the backend instances. When probing is successful and the back end can receive traffic, it's considered healthy. Otherwise, it's considered unhealthy.
Important
If there is a network security group (NSG) on an Application Gateway subnet, open port ranges 65503-65534 for v1 SKUs, and 65200-65535 for v2 SKUs on the Application Gateway subnet for inbound traffic. This port range is required for Azure infrastructure communication. They are protected (locked down) by Azure certificates. Without proper certificates, external entities, including the customers of those gateways, won't be able to initiate any changes on those endpoints.
View backend health through the portal
In the portal, backend health is provided automatically. In an existing application gateway, select Monitoring > Backend health.
Each member in the backend pool is listed on this page (whether it's a NIC, IP, or FQDN). Backend pool name, port, backend HTTP settings name, and health status are shown. Valid values for health status are Healthy, Unhealthy, and Unknown.
Note
If you see a backend health status of Unknown, ensure that access to the back end is not blocked by an NSG rule, a user-defined route (UDR), or a custom DNS in the virtual network.
View backend health through PowerShell
The following PowerShell code shows how to view backend health by using the Get-AzApplicationGatewayBackendHealth cmdlet:
Get-AzApplicationGatewayBackendHealth -Name ApplicationGateway1 -ResourceGroupName ContosoView backend health through Azure CLI
az network application-gateway show-backend-health --resource-group AdatumAppGatewayRG --name AdatumAppGatewayResults
The following snippet shows an example of the response:
{"BackendAddressPool": { "Id": "/subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/ContosoRG/providers/Microsoft.Network/applicationGateways/applicationGateway1/backendAddressPools/appGatewayBackendPool"},"BackendHttpSettingsCollection": [ { "BackendHttpSettings": { "Id": "/00000000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/ContosoRG/providers/Microsoft.Network/applicationGateways/applicationGateway1/backendHttpSettingsCollection/appGatewayBackendHttpSettings" }, "Servers": [ { "Address": "hostname.westus.cloudapp.azure.com", "Health": "Healthy" }, { "Address": "hostname.westus.cloudapp.azure.com", "Health": "Healthy" } ] }]}Diagnostic logs
You can use different types of logs in Azure to manage and troubleshoot application gateways. You can access some of these logs through the portal. All logs can be extracted from Azure Blob storage and viewed in different tools, such as Azure Monitor logs, Excel, and Power BI. You can learn more about the different types of logs from the following list:
- Activity log: You can use Azure activity logs (formerly known as operational logs and audit logs) to view all operations that are submitted to your Azure subscription, and their status. Activity log entries are collected by default, and you can view them in the Azure portal.
- Access log: You can use this log to view Application Gateway access patterns and analyze important information. This includes the caller's IP, requested URL, response latency, return code, and bytes in and out. An access log is collected every 60 seconds. This log contains one record per instance of Application Gateway. The Application Gateway instance is identified by the instanceId property.
- Performance log: You can use this log to view how Application Gateway instances are performing. This log captures performance information for each instance, including total requests served, throughput in bytes, total requests served, failed request count, and healthy and unhealthy backend instance count. A performance log is collected every 60 seconds. The Performance log is available only for the v1 SKU. For the v2 SKU, use Metrics for performance data.
- Firewall log: You can use this log to view the requests that are logged through either detection or prevention mode of an application gateway that is configured with the web application firewall. Firewall logs are collected every 60 seconds.
Note
Logs are available only for resources deployed in the Azure Resource Manager deployment model. You cannot use logs for resources in the classic deployment model. For a better understanding of the two models, see the Understanding Resource Manager deployment and classic deployment article.
You have three options for storing your logs:
- Storage account: Storage accounts are best used for logs when logs are stored for a longer duration and reviewed when needed.
- Event hubs: Event hubs are a great option for integrating with other security information and event management (SIEM) tools to get alerts on your resources.
- Azure Monitor logs: Azure Monitor logs is best used for general real-time monitoring of your application or looking at trends.
Enable logging through PowerShell
Activity logging is automatically enabled for every Resource Manager resource. You must enable access and performance logging to start collecting the data available through those logs. To enable logging, use the following steps:
Note your storage account's resource ID, where the log data is stored. This value is of the form: /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<resource group name>/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/<storage account name>. You can use any storage account in your subscription. You can use the Azure portal to find this information.
Note your application gateway's resource ID for which logging is enabled. This value is of the form: /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<resource group name>/providers/Microsoft.Network/applicationGateways/<application gateway name>. You can use the portal to find this information.
Enable diagnostic logging by using the following PowerShell cmdlet:
Set-AzDiagnosticSetting -ResourceId /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<resource group name>/providers/Microsoft.Network/applicationGateways/<application gateway name> -StorageAccountId /subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<resource group name>/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/<storage account name> -Enabled $true
Tip
Activity logs do not require a separate storage account. The use of storage for access and performance logging incurs service charges.
Enable logging through the Azure portal
In the Azure portal, find your resource and select Diagnostic settings.
For Application Gateway, three logs are available:
- Access log
- Performance log
- Firewall log
To start collecting data, select Turn on diagnostics.
The Diagnostics settings page provides the settings for the diagnostic logs. In this example, Log Analytics stores the logs. You can also use event hubs and a storage account to save the diagnostic logs.
Type a name for the settings, confirm the settings, and select Save.
Activity log
Azure generates the activity log by default. The logs are preserved for 90 days in the Azure event logs store. Learn more about these logs by reading the View events and activity log article.
Access log
The access log is generated only if you've enabled it on each Application Gateway instance, as detailed in the preceding steps. The data is stored in the storage account that you specified when you enabled the logging. Each access of Application Gateway is logged in JSON format as shown below.
For Application Gateway and WAF v2 SKU
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| instanceId | Application Gateway instance that served the request. |
| clientIP | IP of the immediate client of Application Gateway. If another proxy fronts your application gateway, this displays the IP of that fronting proxy. |
| httpMethod | HTTP method used by the request. |
| requestUri | URI of the received request. |
| UserAgent | User agent from the HTTP request header. |
| httpStatus | HTTP status code returned to the client from Application Gateway. |
| httpVersion | HTTP version of the request. |
| receivedBytes | Size of packet received, in bytes. |
| sentBytes | Size of packet sent, in bytes. |
| clientResponseTime | Length of time (in seconds) that it takes for the first byte of a client request to be processed and the first byte sent in the response to the client. |
| timeTaken | Length of time (in seconds) that it takes for the first byte of a client request to be processed and its last-byte sent in the response to the client. It's important to note that the Time-Taken field usually includes the time that the request and response packets are traveling over the network. |
| WAFEvaluationTime | Length of time (in seconds) that it takes for the request to be processed by the WAF. |
| WAFMode | Value can be either Detection or Prevention |
| transactionId | Unique identifier to correlate the request received from the client |
| sslEnabled | Whether communication to the backend pools used TLS. Valid values are on and off. |
| sslCipher | Cipher suite being used for TLS communication (if TLS is enabled). |
| sslProtocol | SSL/TLS protocol being used (if TLS is enabled). |
| serverRouted | The backend server that application gateway routes the request to. |
| serverStatus | HTTP status code of the backend server. |
| serverResponseLatency | Latency of the response (in seconds) from the backend server. |
| host | Address listed in the host header of the request. If rewritten using header rewrite, this field contains the updated host name |
| originalRequestUriWithArgs | This field contains the original request URL |
| requestUri | This field contains the URL after the rewrite operation on Application Gateway |
| originalHost | This field contains the original request host name |
{ "timeStamp": "2021-10-14T22:17:11+00:00", "resourceId": "/SUBSCRIPTIONS/{subscriptionId}/RESOURCEGROUPS/{resourceGroupName}/PROVIDERS/MICROSOFT.NETWORK/APPLICATIONGATEWAYS/{applicationGatewayName}", "listenerName": "HTTP-Listener", "ruleName": "Storage-Static-Rule", "backendPoolName": "StaticStorageAccount", "backendSettingName": "StorageStatic-HTTPS-Setting", "operationName": "ApplicationGatewayAccess", "category": "ApplicationGatewayAccessLog", "properties": { "instanceId": "appgw_2", "clientIP": "185.42.129.24", "clientPort": 45057, "httpMethod": "GET", "originalRequestUriWithArgs": "\/", "requestUri": "\/", "requestQuery": "", "userAgent": "Mozilla\/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit\/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome\/52.0.2743.116 Safari\/537.36", "httpStatus": 200, "httpVersion": "HTTP\/1.1", "receivedBytes": 184, "sentBytes": 466, "clientResponseTime": 0, "timeTaken": 0.034, "WAFEvaluationTime": "0.000", "WAFMode": "Detection", "transactionId": "592d1649f75a8d480a3c4dc6a975309d", "sslEnabled": "on", "sslCipher": "ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384", "sslProtocol": "TLSv1.2", "sslClientVerify": "NONE", "sslClientCertificateFingerprint": "", "sslClientCertificateIssuerName": "", "serverRouted": "52.239.221.65:443", "serverStatus": "200", "serverResponseLatency": "0.028", "originalHost": "20.110.30.194", "host": "20.110.30.194" }}Note
Access logs with clientIP value 127.0.0.1 originate from an internal security process running on the application gateway instances. You can safely ignore these log entries.
For Application Gateway Standard and WAF SKU (v1)
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| instanceId | Application Gateway instance that served the request. |
| clientIP | Originating IP for the request. |
| clientPort | Originating port for the request. |
| httpMethod | HTTP method used by the request. |
| requestUri | URI of the received request. |
| RequestQuery | Server-Routed: Backend pool instance that was sent the request.X-AzureApplicationGateway-LOG-ID: Correlation ID used for the request. It can be used to troubleshoot traffic issues on the backend servers. SERVER-STATUS: HTTP response code that Application Gateway received from the back end. |
| UserAgent | User agent from the HTTP request header. |
| httpStatus | HTTP status code returned to the client from Application Gateway. |
| httpVersion | HTTP version of the request. |
| receivedBytes | Size of packet received, in bytes. |
| sentBytes | Size of packet sent, in bytes. |
| timeTaken | Length of time (in milliseconds) that it takes for a request to be processed and its response to be sent. This is calculated as the interval from the time when Application Gateway receives the first byte of an HTTP request to the time when the response send operation finishes. It's important to note that the Time-Taken field usually includes the time that the request and response packets are traveling over the network. |
| sslEnabled | Whether communication to the backend pools used TLS/SSL. Valid values are on and off. |
| host | The hostname with which the request has been sent to the backend server. If backend hostname is being overridden, this name will reflect that. |
| originalHost | The hostname with which the request was received by the Application Gateway from the client. |
{ "resourceId": "/SUBSCRIPTIONS/{subscriptionId}/RESOURCEGROUPS/PEERINGTEST/PROVIDERS/MICROSOFT.NETWORK/APPLICATIONGATEWAYS/{applicationGatewayName}", "operationName": "ApplicationGatewayAccess", "time": "2017-04-26T19:27:38Z", "category": "ApplicationGatewayAccessLog", "properties": { "instanceId": "ApplicationGatewayRole_IN_0", "clientIP": "191.96.249.97", "clientPort": 46886, "httpMethod": "GET", "requestUri": "/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php", "requestQuery": "X-AzureApplicationGateway-CACHE-HIT=0&SERVER-ROUTED=10.4.0.4&X-AzureApplicationGateway-LOG-ID=874f1f0f-6807-41c9-b7bc-f3cfa74aa0b1&SERVER-STATUS=404", "userAgent": "-", "httpStatus": 404, "httpVersion": "HTTP/1.0", "receivedBytes": 65, "sentBytes": 553, "timeTaken": 205, "sslEnabled": "off", "host": "www.contoso.com", "originalHost": "www.contoso.com" }}Performance log
The performance log is generated only if you have enabled it on each Application Gateway instance, as detailed in the preceding steps. The data is stored in the storage account that you specified when you enabled the logging. The performance log data is generated in 1-minute intervals. It is available only for the v1 SKU. For the v2 SKU, use Metrics for performance data. The following data is logged:
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| instanceId | Application Gateway instance for which performance data is being generated. For a multiple-instance application gateway, there is one row per instance. |
| healthyHostCount | Number of healthy hosts in the backend pool. |
| unHealthyHostCount | Number of unhealthy hosts in the backend pool. |
| requestCount | Number of requests served. |
| latency | Average latency (in milliseconds) of requests from the instance to the back end that serves the requests. |
| failedRequestCount | Number of failed requests. |
| throughput | Average throughput since the last log, measured in bytes per second. |
{ "resourceId": "/SUBSCRIPTIONS/{subscriptionId}/RESOURCEGROUPS/{resourceGroupName}/PROVIDERS/MICROSOFT.NETWORK/APPLICATIONGATEWAYS/{applicationGatewayName}", "operationName": "ApplicationGatewayPerformance", "time": "2016-04-09T00:00:00Z", "category": "ApplicationGatewayPerformanceLog", "properties": { "instanceId":"ApplicationGatewayRole_IN_1", "healthyHostCount":"4", "unHealthyHostCount":"0", "requestCount":"185", "latency":"0", "failedRequestCount":"0", "throughput":"119427" }}Note
Latency is calculated from the time when the first byte of the HTTP request is received to the time when the last byte of the HTTP response is sent. It's the sum of the Application Gateway processing time plus the network cost to the back end, plus the time that the back end takes to process the request.
Firewall log
The firewall log is generated only if you have enabled it for each application gateway, as detailed in the preceding steps. This log also requires that the web application firewall is configured on an application gateway. The data is stored in the storage account that you specified when you enabled the logging. The following data is logged:
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| instanceId | Application Gateway instance for which firewall data is being generated. For a multiple-instance application gateway, there is one row per instance. |
| clientIp | Originating IP for the request. |
| clientPort | Originating port for the request. |
| requestUri | URL of the received request. |
| ruleSetType | Rule set type. The available value is OWASP. |
| ruleSetVersion | Rule set version used. Available values are 2.2.9 and 3.0. |
| ruleId | Rule ID of the triggering event. |
| message | User-friendly message for the triggering event. More details are provided in the details section. |
| action | Action taken on the request. Available values are Blocked and Allowed (for custom rules), Matched (when a rule matches a part of the request), and Detected and Blocked (these are both for mandatory rules, depending on if the WAF is in detection or prevention mode). |
| site | Site for which the log was generated. Currently, only Global is listed because rules are global. |
| details | Details of the triggering event. |
| details.message | Description of the rule. |
| details.data | Specific data found in request that matched the rule. |
| details.file | Configuration file that contained the rule. |
| details.line | Line number in the configuration file that triggered the event. |
| hostname | Hostname or IP address of the Application Gateway. |
| transactionId | Unique ID for a given transaction which helps group multiple rule violations that occurred within the same request. |
{ "timeStamp": "2021-10-14T22:17:11+00:00", "resourceId": "/SUBSCRIPTIONS/{subscriptionId}/RESOURCEGROUPS/{resourceGroupName}/PROVIDERS/MICROSOFT.NETWORK/APPLICATIONGATEWAYS/{applicationGatewayName}", "operationName": "ApplicationGatewayFirewall", "category": "ApplicationGatewayFirewallLog", "properties": { "instanceId": "appgw_2", "clientIp": "185.42.129.24", "clientPort": "", "requestUri": "\/", "ruleSetType": "OWASP_CRS", "ruleSetVersion": "3.0.0", "ruleId": "920350", "message": "Host header is a numeric IP address", "action": "Matched", "site": "Global", "details": { "message": "Warning. Pattern match \\\"^[\\\\d.:]+$\\\" at REQUEST_HEADERS:Host .... ", "data": "20.110.30.194:80", "file": "rules\/REQUEST-920-PROTOCOL-ENFORCEMENT.conf", "line": "791" }, "hostname": "20.110.30.194:80", "transactionId": "592d1649f75a8d480a3c4dc6a975309d", "policyId": "default", "policyScope": "Global", "policyScopeName": "Global" }}View and analyze the activity log
You can view and analyze activity log data by using any of the following methods:
- Azure tools: Retrieve information from the activity log through Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI, the Azure REST API, or the Azure portal. Step-by-step instructions for each method are detailed in the Activity operations with Resource Manager article.
- Power BI: If you don't already have a Power BI account, you can try it for free. By using the Power BI template apps, you can analyze your data.
View and analyze the access, performance, and firewall logs
Azure Monitor logs can collect the counter and event log files from your Blob storage account. It includes visualizations and powerful search capabilities to analyze your logs.
You can also connect to your storage account and retrieve the JSON log entries for access and performance logs. After you download the JSON files, you can convert them to CSV and view them in Excel, Power BI, or any other data-visualization tool.
Tip
If you're familiar with Visual Studio and basic concepts of changing values for constants and variables in C#, you can use the log converter tools available from GitHub.
Analyzing Access logs through GoAccess
We have published a Resource Manager template that installs and runs the popular GoAccess log analyzer for Application Gateway Access Logs. GoAccess provides valuable HTTP traffic statistics such as Unique Visitors, Requested Files, Hosts, Operating Systems, Browsers, HTTP Status codes and more. For more details, please see the Readme file in the Resource Manager template folder in GitHub.
Next steps
- Visualize counter and event logs by using Azure Monitor logs.
- Visualize your Azure activity log with Power BI blog post.
- View and analyze Azure activity logs in Power BI and more blog post.
