Reducing Log Analytics Cost for App Insights by Removing Successful Dependency Logs Ingestion from .NET Applications

 We have discussed how to reduce log analytics cost by reducing container log ingestion from apps deployed to AKS in the post "Reducing Log Analytics Cost by Preventing Container Logs Ingession from Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)". However, when we inspected the charts o f data ingestion after reducing container logs, the next major data volume is ingested by app dependecy logs, coming from .NET apps running in AKS cluster. App dependecy logs are mostly information logs coming from the .NET SDK and other dependecies such as Azure storage etc. These logs are useful when there is an issue or error in the dependecy calls. However, when the dependency has run with successful state, there is not much use of that information. Since, the highest cost for app insights log analytics cost is incurred by dependency logs after we have removed container logs, it is worth to reduce the cost of log analytics data ingestion for app insights, by removing the successful dependecy logs from the app insights.

The expected outcome is as shown below. After the removal of succesful dpenedecy logs data ingestion for dependecy logs has reduce to almost zero.

Reducing Log Analytics Cost by Preventing Container Logs Ingestion from Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

 Monitoring is an essential part of a deployment of software on a platform such as AKS. However, once monitoring enabled there could be significant cost involved for monitoring data. When we enable log analytics workspace to ingest monitoring data from AKS, by default AKS will ingest all container logs, except for kube-system and gatekeeper-system namespaces. If our application are having large amout of container logs generated, then the cost will be lot higher for log analytics workspace. In case we are using app insights/ or an alternative system to monitor the application logs, for the applications deployed to AKS, we have enuough information to diagnose issues etc. Therefore, to reduce unnecessary cost log analytics can be done, by preventing AKS ingestion of the container logs to log analytics workspace. Let's explore the steps.

Expected outcome

As shown in the below figure, the log analytics workspace ingestion over time chart, is indicating the container logs data is no longer getting ingested after the change is applied.

 

TFS Build Agent Fail on Get Source After Upgrade

TFS on premise requires you to keep your TFS updated as almost in every quarter a new update to the TFS is released as well as a new version every year. For this you might have to do TFS Upgrades. If you have upgraded from TFS 2015 to TFS 2018 you have to remove the version 1.xx build agents and configure version 2.xx build agents. Your existing build might encounter workspace issues and may not be able to get sources downloaded to build, in the build agents after the upgrade of agents done. Let’s look at how we can get this issue resolved.

Script to Delete All Workspaces of a Computer from TFS

Sometime you need to clean up machines, especially build servers after a TFS upgrade to get the agents working as intended. If you ever come across a situation where you want to remove all Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) workspaces from TFS for a given machine, considering all collections and all users, the script available here will help you to do that.