Month: July 2018

Custom Log Analytics logging with Logic Apps!

Here is a quick demo on sending a simple API to Log Analytics using Logic Apps. It used to be quite a pain to get data to Log Analytics – using an API, sending via something like an Azure Function, Azure Automation Runbook, PowerShell scripts, etc… Now, you can do it in about 3 minutes with no code!

First – some assumptions:
1: You have a Log Analytics workspace already set in Azure. See this article if you need help with that.
2: Actually, there is no 2. Just make sure you have a Log Analytics workspace.

Create a Logic Apps….App. That naming convention seems wrong.

It will take a few seconds for the app to be created. When it is, enter the designer. In this example, we are going to retrieve a simple piece of data via a web API – we are going to get a current stock quote from IEXTrading.com. For those that don’t know, IEXTrading has an AMAZING web API for pulling stock data. Seriously – check it out: https://iextrading.com/developer/docs/

In this example we will setup a simple 15 minute timer, pull the data from IEXTrading, take the JSON payload from the API call, and send that to Log Analytics. It’s actually really easy.

If you haven’t setup a Log Analytics connection in Logic Apps, then there are a couple of pieces of information from Log Analytics you are going to need. Go into your Log Analytics workspace, click on the ‘Advanced Settings’ section and copy down the “Workspace ID” and either the “Primary” or “Secondary” key. Enter those into the connection information for the Logic Apps Connector. I’ve shown you mine here:

Now – just let it run! It might fail for the first couple of runs – I believe this has something to do with the creation of the custom log in Log Analytics. After a (short) period of time, you can query for your custom log in Log Analytics. The one thing you should know is that the log name you specified in Logic Apps will be appended with “_CL”. That stands for Custom Log, and it will show up if you want it to or not. You can search for you log like this:

search *
| where Type == "Stock_Prices_CL"

Logic Apps or Flow – String to Array

Ran across an interesting problem today – how to, in Flow or Logic Apps, take a string and create a data array from it. In this particular instance, the bit of data was being emailed to an Outlook.com inbox, and we wanted to parse that data and only work with 3 pieces of the string. It sounds easy, as actually is, but takes a small bit of knowledge ahead of time. Hopefully this helps you avoid some web-searches.

So let’s say we have some data formatted like this:

["f8c8e13b-48be-4a91-818e-c6fasdfd001","OM.DEMO","Processor","% Processor Time","1",45.9060745239258,"2018-07-17T19:46:55.577Z","OpsManager12","\\\\OM.DEMO\\Processor(1)\\% Processor Time","d88f095c-8bf8-4e88-d827-663fe6asdf01",null,null,null,null,null,null,"Perf"]

This data is a sample performance metric – something you might receive from Log Analytics, for example. This data is obviously an array in theory, but right now it’s just a long string to Flow or Logic Apps. So, let’s get this into a usable array and access only the bits we want.

Here is the email:

Now, let’s create a trigger and add a “Compose” action. There is literally no configuration to the “Compose” action.

Next, initialize a variable and set it’s type to an Array. Set the value to the output of the “Compose” action.

From here, you can call the individual instances of the array in a very straight forward method. You simple reference the index of the item you want like this: variables(‘StringArray’)[1] (This would return the second item in the array since the array numbering starts at 0). In this example, I pull out three pieces of data, and (for no particular reason) email it back to myself.

And the email: