Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – September 2017

by Sriram Hariharan | Sep 27, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

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 at 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 intellisense – 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

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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!

Previous Updates

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

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – August 2017

by Sriram Hariharan | Aug 23, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

You can really feel how time actually flies if you have attended the Azure Logic Apps Live webcast from the Logic Apps team. It feels just like yesterday when the team came online and presented a bunch of updates for the month of July and in no matter of time, here they were today (August 22) to present the next set of updates. I’ve always been fascinated by the commitment from the Logic Apps team in rolling out new features, organizing these monthly webcasts and responding to queries on the Twitter channel. Right, now on to the Jeff Hollan and Kevin Lam show!!! (Credits to Eldert Grootenboer for terming this during the webinar!)

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

1.  Azure Event Grid – The newest and hottest kid in town; technical preview version was released by Microsoft on August 16th.
   

   What is Azure Event Grid??

   Azure Event Grid is the event-based routing as a service offering from Microsoft that aligns with their “Serverless” strategy. Azure Event Grid simplifies the Event Consumption logic by making it more of a “Push” mechanism rather than a “Pull” mechanism – meaning, you can simply listen to and react to events from different Azure services and other sources without having to constantly poll into each service and look for events. Azure Event Grid is definitely a game changing feature from Microsoft in the #Serverless space.

   The best example where you can use Azure Event Grid is to automatically get notified when any user makes a slight modification to the production subscription, or when you have multiple IoT devices pumping telemetry data.

   Azure Event Grid Connectors for Logic Apps

   At present, there is a Azure Event Grid Connector with only one trigger – Azure Event Grid – When a resource event occurs. You can use this connector to trigger events whenever a resource event occurs.
   

   The Logic Apps team is also working on adding a new connector – Publish Event which will be rolled out shortly. Using this connector, users can publish events (e.g., all events related to Serverless) into the Event Grid.
   

2. Custom HTML and CSV headers – If you have an array of data (example, #Serverless on Twitter), you can easily convert the information into a CSV document or HTML table by using the “Create CSV Table” action. Later, you can pick up this CSV table and easily embed to an email.
3. Enable Log Analytics from Create – More easier way to enable Log Analytics by toggling the status while creating the Logic App. You no longer need to go to the Diagnostics section to enable Log Analytics. Check out this detailed blog post that shows how you can enable Log Analytics while creating the Logic App.
   
4. OMS Workspace Dashboard – Create a global dashboard for all the available Logic Apps under your subscription. View the status of the Logic App, number of runs and additional details. Check out this blog post on how you can integrate Azure Logic Apps and Log Analytics.
   
5. Peek at code view – Say, you are working with Logic Apps and you add a connector. From now, you can easily switch between the code view and designer view by clicking “Peek code” from the Options drop down (….).
   
   
   Note: At present, the Peek code is available only in Read-Only mode. If you wish you need to edit the code directly from here, you can send the Logic Apps team a feedback on Twitter or through User Voice.
6. Advanced Scheduling in the Logic Apps Designer – There are new options to schedule the Logic App execution on a Daily and Weekly basis. This was available in the code view but now you can get this experience right in the designer. Monthly update will be rolled out soon!
   
   In the Schedule trigger, you will notice that when you click on Week, there are few advanced operations available for you to define when you want the trigger to execute during a week. Say, you want your trigger to execute every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9:35 AM, 1:35 PM; 5:35 PM. The below screenshot depicts the example. The preview section will display the actual Logic App trigger condition based on the previous selections.
   
   

New Connectors

• Azure Table Storage – This was one of the second most sought after connector from the community!
• Azure Event Grid
• Azure Log Analytics
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse
• Microsoft StaffHub
• MySQL (R/W)
• ServiceNow (East US 2 region)
• Amazon Redshift
• DocFusion 365

What’s in Progress?

As usual, another long list of features that the Logic Apps team is currently working on and should be available in the coming weeks.

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.
   NOTE: This works with the Polling Trigger (and not with Request Triggers such as Twitter connector etc) without SplitOn enabled.
2. Custom Connectors – Get your own connector within your subscription so that your connector gets shown up on the list. This is currently in Private preview and should be available for public in the month of September.
3. Large Files – Ability to move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP). This is almost ready for release!
4. SOAP – Native SOAP support to consume cloud and on-premise SOAP services. This is one of the most requested features on UserVoice.
5. Variables (code-view live) – append capability to aggregate data within loops. The AppendToArray will be shipped soon, and AppendToString will come in the next few weeks.
6. Expression intellisense – This functionality will go live on August 25th. Say, if you are typing an expression, you will see the same intelligent view that you see when you are typing in Visual studio.
   
7. Expression Tracing –  You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
8. Foreach nesting in the designer – This capability will soon be incorporated into the designer in the coming few weeks.
9. Foreach failure navigation – If there are 1000 iterations in the foreach loop and 10 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.
10. Functions + Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. This functionality will be going live by end of August.
11. Publish Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow in a easy way
12. Time based batching
13. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Workday
    2. Feedly
    3. SQL Triggers (available in East US today but will be available across other regions in a few weeks)

Watch the recording of this session here

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Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

1. Integration Bootcamp on September 21-22, 2017 at Charlotte, North Carolina. This event will focus on BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management and lots more.
2. 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.
   
3. New York Hackathon – September 5, 2017 – A first of its kind Hackathon event on September 5, 2017 at Microsoft Times Square office in Downtown, Washington. This hackathon will focus on Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure App Services, API Management and more. If you are interested to attend this hackathon, send the Logic Apps team a Tweet (DM), email.
4. Microsoft Ignite – September 25—29, 2017 at Orlando, Florida – Sessions on Logic Apps, APIs, Integration, and Serverless

Why attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event?

Here’s a heads up as to why you have to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event.

Also check out this blog post that should get you convinced on why to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event: Read blog

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!

Previous Updates

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

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – July 2017

by Sriram Hariharan | Jul 27, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

After the previous Logic Apps live webcast back in May 2017, the team were back just in time for their webcast on July 26, 2017 – a day before Logic Apps went Generally Available (GA) one year ago! Yes, Azure Logic Apps officially turns 1!! A huge round of applause and shout out to the team at Microsoft for giving a great product offering. This episode of Logic Apps live webcast had Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey giving the recent updates that have rolled into the product.

Happy Birthday Logic Apps! You’ve turned 1 and have a long way to go!

New York Hackathon – September 5, 2017

The Logic Apps team is conducting a very unique, first of its kind Hackathon event on September 5, 2017 at Microsoft Times Square office in Downtown, Washington. This hackathon will focus on Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure App Services, API Management and more. If you are interested to attend this hackathon, send the Logic Apps team a Tweet (DM), email.

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

1. Export Logic App in Visual Studio – When you open a Logic App from Cloud Explorer in Visual Studio, you can export the Logic App to your Visual Studio project. This will create a file on your file system of the Logic App as an ARM template. You can import this template into the Visual Studio and start using your Logic App within Visual Studio.
2. Webhooks in Foreach loop – Previously, it was possible to have Webhooks across the Logic App and now the functionality has been extended to the Foreach loop. You can have as many Webhooks in your foreach loop.
3. Service Principal Authentication (Azure Data Lake and ARM) – If you are using any resource templates, one of the biggest challenges with some OAuth connectors is that you have to give your consent by signing up and giving Logic Apps the permission to access your connection details. This is a challenge when there are numerous deployments. Instead, now when you try to connect to Azure Resource Manager or Azure Data Lake, you can now connect using the Azure Application Service Principal. All you have to do is provide a secret key that has access to the application. Soon, this functionality will roll out to Office365 connectors, Dynamics connectors and SharePoint connectors.
   
   
4. Array handling in designer – Let’s say you have a situation where you have an output from one of the Logic App steps and you want to input the actual array object instead of the actual elements, this operation is now possible in the Logic Apps designer. This is best implemented now in the “Send Email” step where you can add multiple attachments as an array.
5. Batch Processing – Jon Fancey demonstrated this functionality at INTEGRATE 2017 where users can group things together (arbitrarily).
   
6. Variable decrement – In addition to initialize and increment (discussed in the earlier Logic Apps Live webcast), and the Set functionality explained here, the Logic Apps team have added the “decrement” capability to variables. The team will be adding support for more variable types in the coming weeks/months.
7. Run history compressed view – When you click the Run History section, you will see a compressed view of the actual run history that lists the failed runs for you to easily act upon.
   
8. Run API time-range filter – You can now filter the runs based on the time-range (say, between two date range times)
9. Action Configuration settings (splitOn, retry policy, timeout, sequential flag, disable async polling) – All these operations (that are configurable) can now be performed right from the Logic Apps Designer in the Trigger Configuration settings.
   
10. Pan and zoom within the Designer
    
11. Server side paging (eg., SQL) – For instance, SQL has a page size limit of 256 rows in a request. Say, when you query more than 256 rows, only the first 256 rows would be fetched from the database. Now you can enable Server Side Paging from the Designer where there is a configurable value and you can retrieve the number of rows depending on the value that is configured.
12. Expression Authoring – You can build your expression functions from the designer, and all other expressions are listed right in the Designer. It becomes easy for you to find the expressions.
    
13. Smart tips – There are hints now available in the Logic Apps Designer that will remind you to perform a very important action.
    
14. XSLT Byte Order Mark config – When you use the Transform action, you will normally get back the XML and along with it, you will receive the byte order mark. The Logic Apps team has now in fact cleaned the code in such a way that you can now opt out from receiving those byte order mark in addition to the XML.
15. Open Sourced Templates – You can submit New / update the existing Templates at github.com/azure/logicapps. The Logic Apps team will review the templates and publish them accordingly.

New Connectors

• Azure File Storage – You can now access your blob attached storage from/to your VM
• ARM Invoke and Service Principal – The ARM Invoke is super powerful. For any Azure Resource that you have access to, you can easily Start/Stop the VM, etc.
• Azure Application Insights – This connector allows you to queue up reports and run queries to get the App Insights report
• Video Indexer
• Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Forms
• Bing Maps
• Bing Search
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Parserr
• Calendly
• Teamwork
• JotForm
• Freshservice
• Pitney Bowes
• AWeber
• Cognito Forms
• Team Work
• PostreSQL

What’s in Progress?

1. Large Files – Ability to move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP)
2. SOAP – One of the most requested features on UserVoice. Once available, you will be able to consume SOAP services (both cloud and on-premise)
3. Expression Intellisense – Logic Apps workflow definitions will incorporate the same code used by Microsoft Visual Studio
4. Expression tracing – With this capability, you can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
5. Foreach nesting in the designer – This was a backend capability that was recently released but this capability will soon be incorporated into the designer.
6. Foreach failure navigation – Say, you have about 1000 iterations in the foreach loop and 5 of them actually failed, you have to look for which one actually failed. Instead, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.
7. Functions + Swagger
8. Logic Apps OMS Package – You can monitor all the Logic Apps using a B2B solution within the Operations Management Suite (OMS). The preview of this OMS dashboard will be available within the next month (before next Logic Apps live webcast). You can bulk resubmit at the same time.
   
   
9. Variables append (capability)
10. Publish Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow in a easy way
11. Export Flow to Logic App ARM template
12. Code view peek in the Action
13. Time based batching
14. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Azure Tables
    2. Azure SQL Data Warehouse
    3. Service Now
    4. Workday
    5. Feedly
    6. MySQL (RW)
    7. Amazon Redshift

You can watch the recording of this session here
[embedded content]

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

1. Integration Bootcamp on September 21-22, 2017 at Charlotte, North Carolina. This event will focus on BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management and lots more.
2. INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today.
   

Why attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event?

Jim Harrer (Pro Integration Team Program Manager, Microsoft) and Saravana Kumar (Founder/CTO – BizTalk360) give you a heads up as to why you have to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event.

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!

Previous Updates

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

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan