microsoft azure logic apps monthly update

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – September 2017

Published on : Sep 28, 2017

Category : Microsoft Azure

Sriram Hariharan

Author

This episode of Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update comes to us directly from #MSIgnite. It is one of those episodes with a special guest and this episode featured Sarah Fender from the Azure Security Center team. The Pro Integration team are at #MSIgnite that’s happening between September 25-29, 2017 in Orlando, FL. I’ll try to give you a very crisp recap of the proceedings during the event and the important announcements from the #MSIgnite event.

Azure Security Center

Sarah started off talking about the Azure Security Center feature. Security Center provides unified security management and threat protection for Azure workloads, workloads running on-premises and on other cloud platforms. It basically assesses the security of the cloud and on-premise workloads and offers out of the box insights. In addition, Security Center offers some built-in security controls such as Just in Time VM access that will help to lock down access to virtual machines, and Adaptive Access Controls that help to lock down on machines to prevent any malware execution. Security Center also monitors the hybrid cloud using advanced concepts like Machine Learning and provides rich graphical data to administrators. Security Center keeps a look into all the different incidents in the environment such as SQL Injection, security incidents, suspicious processes and so on and provides insights which will be very helpful for IT teams to keep a track of the issues in the environment. At #MSIgnite, the Azure Security Center team introduced the new experience of Investigation Dashboard. With this feature, organizations can easily respond to the incident and understand the intricate details about the security incident. The investigation path defines the attack path and the graphical view displays the detailed information such as severity of the attack, attack detected by information and so on. The investigation dashboard also lists the entities and now supports the Playbooks that are nothing but Logic Apps being triggered from Security Center when a certain alert is fired. You can run a Playbook from the Security Center through the integration with Azure Logic Apps. Users can pre-define a Logic App that will actually take a corrective action when there is an attack you can allow the investigation dashboard to automatically execute that particular Logic App (through Playbook) to execute the corrective action. For e.g., when a vulnerability attack is detected with a very high severity, post a message on the slack channel for the users to get notified. After all these updates from Sarah, it was time for the Logic Apps trio comprising of Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey to provide the latest updates on Logic Apps. Kevin Lam started off by giving the latest updates-

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. Custom Connectors – Enables the option to extend your endpoints and register them as connectors in Logic Apps.
  2. Large Message Support – This functionality is now available in the designer. Using this functionality, you can move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP).
  3. Variables append to array – append capability to aggregate data within loops in the designer. Kevin Lam gave a pro tip here for all users –
    Remember to turn on sequential for for-each to achieve this scenario.
  4. Nested foreach and do-until – is now available in the designer.
  5. Enable high throughput scenarios – You can configure the number of scale units within the code view to enable the high-throughput scenarios. Say, you can take one Logic App definition that runs in a scale unit and span it across 16/32/64 scale units to get increased throughput. This is called ludicrous mode (as Kevin had it on the PPT).
  6.  Maximum retries count (Custom Retry Policy) has been increased from 4 to 10.
  7. Now you can export (Publish) Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow
  8. Emit correlation tracking id from the trigger to OMS – This gives full traceability across the process that’s happening across the Logic App.
  9. Expression intelligense – This is now available in the designer. When you are typing an expression, you will see the same intelligent view that you see when you are typing in Visual studio.
  10. Schedule based batching – In addition to batching based on message count, you can batch messages based on the schedule.

New Connectors

  • Azure Security Center Trigger
  • Log Analytics Data Collector – add information to Log Analytics from Log Analytics
  • ServiceNow – create tickets, read & write into ServiceNow
  • DateTime Actions
  • Azure Event Grid Publish
  • Adobe Sign – This was a big announcement from Microsoft at #MSIgnite – collaboration with Adobe
  • O365 Groups
  • Skype for Business
  • LinkedIn
  • Apache Impala
  • FlowForma
  • Bizzy

What’s in Progress?

  1. Concurrency Control (code-view live) – Say, your Logic App is executing in a faster way than you want it to actually work. In this case, you can make Logic Apps to slow down (restrict the number of Logic Apps running in parallel). This is possible today in the code-view where you can define say, only 10 Logic Apps can execute at a particular time in parallel. Therefore, when 10 Logic Apps are executing in parallel, the Logic Apps logic will stop polling until one of the 10 Logic Apps finish execution and then start polling for data.
  2. SOAP – Native SOAP support to consume cloud and on-premise SOAP services. This is one of the most requested features on UserVoice.
  3. Expression Tracing –  You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
  4. Foreach failure navigation – If there are lots of iterations in the foreach loop and few of them failed; instead of having to look for which one actually failed, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.
  5. Functions + Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. This functionality will be going live by end of August.
  6. HTTP OAuth with Certificates
  7. Complex Conditions within the designer
  8. Bulk resubmit in OMS
  9. Batch configuration in Integration Account
  10. Connectors
    1. Workday
    2. Marketo
    3. Compute
    4. Containers
Watch the recording of this session here

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft will be delivering the keynote speech. You can also avail Day Passes for the event (available for Wednesday and Thursday).
  2. ServerlessConf – 2 days of sessions on Serverless with Hackathon during October 2017
  3. Workday Rising – October 9 – 12 at Chicago
  4. CONNECT 2017 on October 9, 2017 at DeFabrique, Utrecht

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here. The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here. If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it! Reach Out Azure Logic Apps Team

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –