Azure PaaS Sitecore Logs using AzureAILogs.html

When hosting Sitecore XP solutions on Azure PaaS – you’ll quickly find out that accessing and viewing Sitecore logs is different than you may be used to.

Sitecore has a great Knowledgebase article available (Access logs and diagnostics data in Sitecore XP on Azure Web Apps) which describes a couple approaches for obtaining the Sitecore logs on a PaaS environment using both Azure Application Insights or FTP.

Grabbing recent log files is pretty straightforward once you’ve configured FTP credentials to access your Sitecore instance.  Simply FTP into the instance (Filezilla is my favorite), navigate to /LogFiles/Application, sort by date, and download the relevant logs.

My preferred approach, however, is utilizing the AzureAILogs.html file that Sitecore provides within the “Using Azure Application Insights REST API” section of the KB article:

Enabling the API Key also requires a few clicks in the Azure portal, but the instructions for enabling this feature are outlined well – and it only takes a couple of minutes to complete.

If you download and open the HTML file locally, the output is pretty sweet:

Once you input the Sitecore app's App Insights App ID and API key, clicking the 'Update Roles' button retrieves the relevant roles for the application (CM, CD, Reporting, and Processing).

Having obtained the roles, you can select one or multiple roles, configure any specific options (recency // checkbox to only show errors // number of entries), and click the 'Get logs from AI' button to make the call.

You’ll end up with filtered and descending log entries you’d typically get from Sitecore logs:

The bonus here is the 'Download logs' button will download the log files – which are also compatible with Sitecore Log Analyzer.

This is super handy as-is, but I also wanted to make it a little easier to access online.  Specifically:

1. I don’t want to input in the App ID and API key every time I want to use this tool.
2. I want to access this from our CM environment, similar to any other admin page.

By adding a few old-fashioned lines of Javascript to my copy of the AzureAILogs.html file (just before the requestHandler function), the page was able to accept two URL query parameters (‘appid’ and ‘apikey’) to prefill the two input values.


For example:
AzureAILogs.html?appid=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx&apikey=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

In order to access this from our CM Authoring environment, I simply added the HTML page to the /sitecore/admin directory.

Once I was able to hit the page from the server, I tacked on our App ID and API Key to the URL and bookmarked the page.   Voila - simple yet effective.

Of course, this is just one of many ways to view Sitecore logs on a PaaS environment - but I found it to be one of the most useful.