MyMonthlyBlogArticle.Bot

This repository contains all the code and deployment scripts related to this project: My monthly "Azure News & Updates" blog article got a Bot! created on April 2018. This repository got actually updated with a more Cloud Native App approach by leveraging associated latest and greatest technologies and features such as Docker, ASP.NET Core 3.1, Helm 3, Kubernetes and Terraform, check this entire story here: My Bot just got powered by .NET Core 3.1, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform.

Prerequisities

You need an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and the recommended K8S version is 1.15.7+ since the mecanism to set the DNS name on the Public Azure IP Address got working back since then.

Deploy

You could deploy this bot locally with VS Code or Visual Studio or even dotnet command line. Other ways explained below are to deploy it with Docker or Helm.

botName=<bot-name>
appId=<app-guid>
appSecret=<app-secret>
azureSearchServiceName=<azure-search-service-name>
azureSearchIndexName=<azure-search-index-name>
azureSearchServiceQueryApiKey=<azure-search-service-query-api-key>
appInsightsInstrumentationKey=<app-insights-instrumentation-key>

Deploy with Docker

docker build \
    -t $botName \
    '
#TODO: docker run -p 80:80 $botName

You could now expose your Docker image in a Container registry, with the command docker push.

Deploy with Helm

As a prerequisities, you need to install cert-manager.

You could then run the helm upgrade command below against your Kuberentes cluster:

registryName=<registry-name>
k8sNamespace=<k8s-namespace-name>
dnsName=<custom-dns-name>
hostName=$dnsName.eastus.cloudapp.azure.com # could depend on your DNS, in my case that's the DNS on the Azure IP Address hosted in EastUS.
issuerEmail=<your-email-for-certificate>

# Install MyMonthlyBlogArticle.Bot
cd chart
helm dependencies update
helm upgrade \
    --namespace $k8sNamespace \
    --create-namespace \
    --install \
    --wait \
    --set image.repository=$registryName/$botName \
    --set image.env.microsoftAppId=$appId \
    --set image.env.microsoftAppPassword=$appPassword \
    --set image.env.appInsights.instrumentationKey=$appInsightsInstrumentationKey \
    --set image.env.search.serviceName=$azureSearchServiceName \
    --set image.env.search.indexName=$azureSearchIndexName \
    --set image.env.search.serviceQueryApiKey=$azureSearchServiceQueryApiKey \
    --set ingress.hostName=$hostName \
    --set issuer.acme.email=$issuerEmail \
    --set nginx-ingress.defaultBackend.enabled=false \
    --set nginx-ingress.controller.image.tag=0.27.1 \
    --set nginx-ingress.controller.service.annotations."service\.beta\.kubernetes\.io/azure-dns-label-name"=$dnsName \
    $botName \
    .

Application Insights

Once the Azure Bot Service deployed you could leverage the Bot Analytics feature with Application Insights like described here.

Additionally to that, you could perform different queries to retrieve information logged from the Bot Framework into Application Insights where additional telemetry has been setup like described here.

Get all the requests:

requests
| order by timestamp desc

Get all the requests about initializing conversations:

requests
| where tostring(customDimensions.activityType) == "conversationUpdate"
| order by timestamp desc

Get all the requests about messages sent:

requests
| where tostring(customDimensions.activityType) == "message"
| order by timestamp desc

Display on a time chart the durations of the message requests:

requests
| where tostring(customDimensions.activityType) == "message"
| project duration, timestamp, appId
| render timechart

Get all the exceptions:

exceptions
| order by timestamp desc

Get all the customEvents:

customEvents
| order by timestamp desc

Count of search by query term:

customEvents
| where name == "BotMessageReceived" 
| summarize count() by tostring(customDimensions.text)

Notes

4 secrets will need to be regenerated:

• TLS certificate generated by cert-manager and Let's Encrypt expires at 90 days
• AAD Application needed for the Bot Service expires at the date define in the TF variables. To regenerate it the password pattern has to be changed in theaadapplication.tf file.
• Container registry's password used in the Azure Pipelines to push and pull images and Helm charts
• AKS SP password used in the Azure Pipelines to deploy the Helm chart