Azure API Management - Setting Up Inbound Policies - 1

There are various inbound policies that can be set when setting up the API Management Service on Microsoft Azure. Having these policies will help rejecting the requests arrive at your endpoints even before they hit the endpoint's internal security logics. In another aspect, you might get your web traffic overloaded due to many reasons. In such scenarios, you can limit them with the inbuilt policies in API Management Service.

In order to explain them in this article, I am picking the default Echo API. When you go to All Operations, you can see similar to the image below.

Then click on 'Add Policy' link to add a new policy. 

Availability Tests with Azure Application Insights

Azure Application Insights provide a great way to log the application events and query them without much of a hazel. Availability test is an option that lets you either ping a server and test or run Multi-step tests.

These can be run in intervals of 5, 10 or 15 minutes and also can be set to ping them within different regions.

Apart from those settings, it also allows setting timeouts. If a time out happens, then it can be configured to retry up to 3 times with 20 second intervals. An item will be considered as a failure only if it fails the retry attempts.

Full documentation on App availability can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/azure-monitor/app/monitor-web-app-availability

This is totally free for unlimited attempts. But if you try the multi-step web tests, it will cost 10 USD per test per month, running unlimited instances. So, why do not you try it away? 

Administering Azure Functions in Portal

Azure functions can be easily managed within the Azure Portal. Though there are certain restrictions, it allows managing the functions and executing them within the portal itself.

Once you navigate inside the function, you can see all available functions within that function app. All the functions I have in the above screen are Http Triggers.