WordPress on Azure: Part 4 - Monitoring & Testing

General

Hello everyone! In today’s blog post, we set up monitoring and testing for our WordPress site.

Set up monitoring

Activate the Application Insights plugin

• Go to the Application Insights resource and copy its Instrumentation Key

• Login to WordPress at https://.azurewebsites.net/login

• Go to Plugins, install and activate the Application Insights plugin

• Go to Settings -> Application Insights and set the Instrumentation Key

• Wait 5 minutes for the integration to take place

Perform some tests

Enable the Availability Test

The web_test module was included in the main deployment template. The specified module creates a standard availability test that performs a GET request to our WordPress site from various locations periodically. If the responses have a status code of 200, they are considered successful; otherwise, they are not. In order to enable this test:

• Go to the Application Insights resource and select the Availability tab

• Click on the test and enable it

Perform a Load Test

• Go to the Azure Load Testing resource that was created

• On the Upload a JMeter script option, click Create

• For the Test Plan provide the tests/load_test_wordpress.jmx

• In the Monitoring tab click Add/Modify and select the Application Insights resource that is connected to the WebApp

• On all the other tabs, provide the desired values

• Create and run the load test

Teardown the infrastructure using the destroy.yaml workflow

Approve teardown

• In order to destroy the infrastructure, we first require some approvals using the following action:

- name: Manual Workflow Approval
  uses: trstringer/manual-approval@v1.6.0
  with:

# All approvers must be contributors in the repository

    approvers: approver-1,approver-2,...,approver-N  # use commas with no space inbetween
    minimum-approvals: x
    secret: ${{ github.TOKEN }}

• This action will open up an Issue, where “x approvers” must respond in a positive manner (as mentioned in the issue’s description) in order to proceed to the next step

• If at least one approver responds negatively, the workflow fails

Destroy the infrastructure

- name: Azure Login
  uses: Azure/login@v1
  with:
    client-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CLIENT_ID }}
    tenant-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_TENANT_ID }}
    subscription-id: ${{ secrets.AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID }}

- name: Delete the resource group and all of its resources
  uses: Azure/cli@v1
  with:
    inlineScript: az group delete -n $RG_NAME -y

Summary

Well, this brings the WordPress-on-Azure series to an end. I hope you found the information useful and that it inspires you to experiment with it.

Previous parts:

• Part 0: Introduction

• Part 1: Architecture

• Part 2: Infrastructure as Code

• Part 3: Deployment

Related repository: WordPress-on-Azure