Maintenance & Monitoring

Frends services are constantly being monitored and taken care of.

The Frends Cloud services are being monitored and managed by the Platform Operations team. Here's an overview of what is being done and at what frequency.

Maintenance

Cloud-hosted Frends resources are updated in line with our release cycle.

For customers with hybrid configurations (Cloud and On-Prem Agents) we arrange a suitable time/date to update the Frends Core service and Agents in order to synchronize the update of On-Prem resources.

OS and Security updates for Cloud Agent are kept in line with Microsoft’s monthly patching cycle.

To avoid Agent downtime during patching we recommend using load balanced Agents in a high availability configuration for production environments.

Database Maintenance

Log and configuration databases for Frends Tenants are periodically maintained by purging old Process Instance logs and reorganizing the indices. This is automated for both cloud and self hosted instances of Frends.

By default, the Process Instance purge and index reorganization will be run on Log Service startup, and is rescheduled to run every 24 hours after finishing successfully. The purge will delete Process Instances older than what is set as the retention period by log settings for each Agent Group, which is up to 60 days.

Backups

Frends Databases (LogStore, ConfigurationStore) have Point-in-time-restore and geo-redundant backups with 30 day retention. ConfigurationStore have an additional off-site backup with 7 day retention.

Monitoring

All Frends Cloud resources are monitored around the clock with alert thresholds set for key metrics.

PaaS Agents

Frends Cloud Agent monitoring services include:

Frends Heartbeat Monitor Service

• Agent Service Availability

Azure Log Analytics Agent (30 Day retention)

• Event logs (System/Application)

  • Error Events (OOM)

  • Service Failures

• Performance Counters (Ingested by Azure Log Analytics)

  • Memory

  • CPU

  • Page File

  • Threads

  • Disk

  • Frends Process Executions

  • Frends Process Logging

  • Network IO

Application Insights

• Availability Checks

• Monitor Agent API Endpoints (Ports 80 and/or 443)

• 5 Second ping from 5 geographically different locations

Frends Core & UI

Monitoring for the Frends Core services and the UI includes:

Web UI

• Performance Counters (Ingested by Azure Log Analytics)

  • Memory

  • CPU

  • Response Time

• Application Insights (Ingested by Azure Log Analytics)

  • Application Exceptions

  • Availability Checks

    • Monitor Frends UI

    • 5 Second ping from 5 geographically different locations

Azure Storage

• Performance Counters (Ingested by Azure Log Analytics)

  • Usage

  • Latency

  • Ingress/Egress

  • Transactions

  • Availability

Database

• Performance Counters (Ingested by Azure Log Analytics)

  • Storage Usage & Growth

  • DTU Load

Service Bus

• Performance Counters (Ingested by Azure Monitor)

  • Inbound/Outbound Messages

  • Requests

  • Connections

  • Active Messages

  • Inbound/Outbound Queue Size

  • Errors (User/Server)

  • Dead Letter Count

  • Message Count

  • Throttled Requests