Author Archives: Bas Lijten

Using Application Insights Annotations and how to trigger them within your application

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Recently I discovered the possibility of adding notes to specific point s in time on the application insights classic metrics. This is a very interesting way of marking specific, important events in your application lifecycle, for example, deployments. It turns out, that an Azure DevOps extension exists to mark application deployments, This might be a point in time where your applications starts to behave differently, due to a bug or new functionality. These events may arise from your application as well. An interesting event could be the time of publishing content in a Content Management System, as it might influence the behaviour of your web application. This blogpost explains how to use annotations in application insights and the things that don’t work (yet)

Source code can be found here

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Enabling the application map in Application Insights for Sitecore to monitor your Sitecore infrastructure and webclients

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In the out of the box configuration for Sitecore on Azure, application insights has been enabled by default. However, this configuration is optimally configured. In normal situations, it’s very valuable to have insights in your infrastructure: what connections provide a lot of errors, latency or other issues. This blogpost explains on how to get these insights with for Sitecore.

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How to query xConnect using the tracker ContactID in Sitecore

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There are situations where not all custom facets have been loaded into your session, or where you want to explicitly check for updates on a custom facet in xConnect, for example when external systems might have been making changes to this facet. This blogpost explains how to use the trackerContactID to query xconnect, which can be used to get these custom facets.

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Increase your (Sitecore) performance by enabling the local cache on Azure App Services

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Although this blog focuses primarily on Sitecore, this blogpost is applicable for any application which is hosted on an Windows Azure App Service.

The file system,which is used by Azure App Services, always points to D:\home, but it is in fact a link to a (slow) performing share. Sitecore can greatly benefit from enabling a local cache, this blogpost describes how to enable this cache.

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Warmup your application on Azure App service when scaling up and swapping slots using “Application Initialization”

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A common problem on Azure web apps when scaling up or swapping slots is “stuttering”. At the moment an instance is added to the pool (scale out) or your swap is swapped (reload the app on the slot), your application is “cold , which means that your application on that instance needs to be reloaded. In the case of Sitecore (or other large applications), this may take a while. In this period, visitors may face a long loading time, which may take up to a few minutes.

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Azure DevOps parallel deployment

Speed up your deployments – parallel app service deployments in Azure DevOps

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Note: Although this blogpost series is focused towards deploying Sitecore with the speed of light, all the information in this blogpost regular web applications and app service deployments

Deploying multiple web deployment packages to multiple app services may take some time. Where parallel jobs in the Build are possible, this is not possbile (yet) in Azure. ARM templates could be used (but I am not 100% sure), but we chose to use app service deployments, as it gives us much more flexibility.

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Automate your pipeline part 1: World’s fastest delivery pipeline for Sitecore on Azure

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On October 9th I presented for the 3rd time at the Sitecore Symposium. In my previous blogpost I described shared how I felt during the creation of this presentation and on the day itself. In this series of blogposts I’ll describe every subject I discussed during my presentation, which will, in the end, enable you to setup your own fully automatic deployment pipeline using standard Microsoft technologie such as msbuild, msdeploy, nuget and Azure DevOps. This blogpost is just a container for all the upcoming blogposts (which is subject to change). When you are missing a subject, feel free to get in touch with me.

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Private Sitecore nuget feeds using VSTS – why we don’t use Sitecore myget and how we work with package management

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First of all: hands down to Sitecore when they created the nuget feed a while back: it’s really, really convenient to be able to use a nuget feed for all those Sitecore packages, including their dependencies. But we had some issues with the way Sitecore versions it’s packages, the fact that we use multiple versions of Sitecore and the way we wanted to provision our own reusable sitecore-specific nuget packages. Aside from that; our existing nuget-feed was a NAS which had many, many performance issues. In the end we came up with a private nuget feed per Sitecore version which contains all the Sitecore assemblies for that specific version, its dependencies and our own reusable nuget packages for that specific Sitecore version.

Source can be found on github

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