To Elastic pool or not to elastic Pool for Sitecore on Azure

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In the Sitecore #azure slack channel there are often discussions about pricing, scaling and performance. A common best practice which is shared in this channel is the use of Elastic Pools for your SQL databases. In this article I our findings, how you can compute the costs for elastic pools and how it will affect performance, as opposed to the default Sitecore ARM templates.

PS: the costs I share are all retrieved from the Azure pricing calculator and are not actual prices from my company – I will never share these.

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Sitecore on Azure – design considerations to be more cost efficient and have more performance

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After working for quite a while with a lot of Sitecore workloads on Azure, we have built up quite some experience with regards to scale and costs management. Although Sitecore has some predefined topologies, there may be various reasons why they will work or won’t work for you. From what we have seem, those topologies are not the most costs effective ones and having different requirements might lead to different choices in terms of what tier is right for you. This series of blogposts gives an overview of choices that could be made and a small indication of the costs estimation for two of the Sitecore of Azure workloads (the Single and Large setup). Please note that some choices might only be valuable for XP or only for XM, or even not be beneficial at all, as there is not cookie-cutter solution for everything. Continue reading →

JSS beginner issues: Placeholder ‘xxx’ was not found in the current rendering data

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Currently, I am researching JSS and I must say: it’s great. So far, I ran into a few issues and although the documentation is great (I would recommend everyone to checkout the styleguide in the default app!), I am sure that people will run into the same issues as I did. I’ll share short blogpost on these issues. Today number 1:
‘Placeholder ‘xxx’ was not found in the current rendering data’
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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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