Monitoring

Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal provides access to a set of predefined dashboards that enable you to monitor your project key application metrics.
You can monitor predefined and customizable metrics such as resources utilization, traffic, availability (uptime), page views & API calls, AI tasks usage, outbound IP addresses, and more.

Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal provides access to application metrics dashboards, where graphical representations of the website usage, reliability and responsiveness are available. To access the dashboard, perform the following:

1. Log in to the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
2. In the left pane, click Overview » Summary.
   The overview of your project opens.
3. Under the Environments section, click the See all metrics link of the respective environment.

Tracked metrics

By default, the Application Metrics dashboard tracks the following items:

• Availability - this metric tracks the average percentage uptime of your production website.
• Unique sessions - this metric provides information about the unique users browsing the website.
• Failed requests - the number of failed requests to your website domain.
• Exceptions - the sum of exceptions your website has thrown during runtime.
• Request Execution Time - how long it takes on average for an ASP.NET request to your website to execute.
• Response time – the average server response time.
• CPU Usage - the average CPU load.
• Available Memory - the average memory load.

Access application insights of your project

PREREQUISITES: You must have installed the Progress.Sitefinity.AppInsights package in your project.

You can further drill down your Sitefinity Cloud project application metrics, leveraging the integration with Azure Portal Application Insights. While dashboards present an up-to date snapshot of your application metrics for a predefined period, Application Insights enables you to further review collected data and monitor your application performance over a specified period.

To view your application insights data, you can click the widgets available on the Application Metrics dashboard. This automatically redirects you to the respective Application Insights section of the Azure Portal. Alternatively, you can login to the Azure Portal and navigate to Application Insights.

The uptime of your website is monitored with health checks configured in Application Insights that run every minute from 5 different locations around the globe. There are three types of health checks:

• Homepage - the homepage health check tests the availability of the website homepage using the main domain.
• Application - the application health checks test the Sitefinity system health by making requests to the Sitefinity Health check service to verify that the application has bootstrapped correctly and can connect to the Azure SQL Database, Azure Redis Cache, and Azure Search services.
• Custom - customers can request for specific URLs to be monitored, in addition to the homepage.

The success criteria for each health check are a 200 OK response status code within a 30 seconds timeout period. If the health check fails, it tries again after 20 seconds. If it fails three times in a row for 2 or more locations around the globe within a 5 minute interval, an incident is automatically triggered and the Sitefinity Cloud On-Call team is engaged to resolve the issue.

You can track the overall availability for your website by opening Application Insights directly through the Azure Portal, or through the View logs link for your Production environment in Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
Once you open Application Insights, click the Availability menu option.

You can track the number of page views and API calls for the current calendar month by opening the Page Views & API Calls link for your Production environment in the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
You receive an email summary from Sitefinity Cloud once a month, providing a breakdown by month for the values of these two metrics for your current billing period. The billing period is 12 months and starts from the month after your purchase date. Depending on your Sitefinity Cloud package, you have a different limit of page views and API calls per month. If you exceeded your page views and API calls limits for the billing period, you will be charged for the overages.

Page views are counted as HTTP requests that match the following criteria:

• Host: must be a Production domain
• Method: GET
• Response code: 200 (OK)
• Bot filter: Likely human (requests that are determined to be from bots are not counted)
• Content type: html
• User agent does not contain "AppInsights" (excludes uptime health checks)
• URL path is not part of Sitefinity Admin UI or media documents

API calls are counted as HTTP requests that match the following criteria:

• Host: must be a Production domain
• Content type: xml OR json
• User agent does not contain "AppInsights" (excludes uptime health checks)
• URL path is not part of Sitefinity system APIs used for Admin UI
  

In addition to the total count of monthly page views and API calls, you can also use KQL to query a breakdown of the data based on the following:

• HTTP method
• HTTP host
• HTTP referrer
• URL path
• Query string

For more information about using KQL, see Microsoft documentation » KQL quick reference.
The top 1000 daily results for page views and API calls are stored as log entries of this log type: SitefinityCloudDailyUsageBreakdown_CL.

To query the data, perform the following:

1. Log in to the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
2. On the Welcome page, click the Page Views & API Calls link for your Production environment.
   
3. Run a custom query against the SitefinityCloudDailyUsageBreakdown_CL log type.

Following are sample queries that you can use:

• Pie chart for page views for current month by Host
  
• Pie chart for page views for current month by URL
  
• Pie chart for API calls for current month by Host
  
• Pie chart for API calls for current month by URL
  

NOTE: To use this feature, you must have purchased the Packaged AI Service add-on.

You can track the number of AI tasks used for your project on monthly basis in the following way:

1. Log in to the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
2. On the Welcome page, click the Used AI Tasks link for your Production environment.

Upon opening the Used AI Tasks link, you are navigated to the Azure Portal, where all AI tasks used for your project are stored as log entries. The data is aggregated by monthly usage.

Sitefinity Cloud offers out-of-the-box integration with Azure OpenAI service through the Packaged AI Service add-on.
Examples of integrated AI capabilities are: using AI to generate content, optimizing and creating personalized content, and AI-assisted content classifications (tagging). For information about all the available AI-powered capabilities, see Packaged AI Service.

All AI-related actions performed in your Sitefinity backend count as AI tasks, except for the AI image search.
Once the Packaged AI Service add-on is purchased, you get a certain AI tasks quota to use for your project (1000 AI tasks are included).
If your quota limit is reached, the AI-powered capabilities in your project will no longer work.
You can increase the total number of AI tasks, if necessary, by purchasing additional AI Tasks add-on.

All used AI tasks are stored as log entries of SitefinityCloudAIMonthlyUsedTasks_CL log type. You can use KQL to run custom queries against the SitefinityCloudAIMonthlyUsedTasks_CL log type.

In Sitefinity Cloud, each environment is hosted within Azure infrastructure and configured to securely communicate with external systems and services. When your Sitefinity CMS, ASP.NET Core, or Next.js application needs to connect to an external API, database, or integration endpoint, it does so using an outbound IP address.
External services may require you to whitelist these connection IPs for security and access control.
Sitefinity Cloud provides an easy way to view the outbound IP addresses used by your Production and non-Production environments.

To view the outbound IP addresses for your Sitefinity Cloud environments, perform the following:

1. Log in to the Sitefinity Cloud Management Portal.
2. On the Welcome page, click the Outbound IP addresses link for your Production or non-Production environment.
   This will open the Azure Key Vault resource associated with your environment directly in the Azure Portal.
3. Click Show secret value to display the respective outbound IP address.

The Sitefinity Cloud dashboards, related to the application development and deployment processes, are easily customizable and facilitate focusing on the most important metrics for your project.

To create a custom dashboard in Azure DevOps Wiki, perform the following:

1. On the Dashboards page, click the New Dashboard button.
   The Create a dashboard dialog opens.
2. In Name, enter a name for your new dashboard.
3. In Description, enter a description optionally.
   If you want to have your dashboard refreshed automatically, also select Automatically refresh the dashboard every 5 minutes.
4. Under Dashboard Type, select one of the following options:
   
   • Team Dashboard
   • Project Dashboard
   If you select the Team Dashboard option, you have to associate the dashboard with a single team. To do so, make your selection from the Team dropdown box.
5. Click Create.