Hi,
Is anyone hosting their Grav installation on Azure and integrated Applications Insights?
Thanks,
Sarah
Hi @techielass, not myself but quite a while ago I tried to get Grav going with Azure and had little luck performance wise - looks like you’ve had much better success!
I’d love to learn more about the process for getting Grav up-and-running on Azure these days, is there anywhere you would suggest I look first? Also, are you running Grav on a free or paid plan - and if paid what might be the approx. monthly costs?
BTW, do you know if Git can be installed on an Azure account for use with the Git Sync plugin?
Thanks very much, any and all info is greatly appreciated🙂
Paul
I have only small sites of max 10 pages and max 10 regular visitors a day and therefor, the free accounts are tempting. However I never actually tried any PaaS hosting because the pricing ‘calculators’ overwhelm and confuse me.
You’ve converted your blog to Grav and run it on Azure successfully, would it be an idea if you write a Grav specific manual for it and add it to the Webservers and Hosting chapter to complement Fortrabbit, Heroku and Cloudways? Shouldn’t be that hard for an Azure evangelist… 
Would love to get my hands dirty on Azure if feasable…
There are probably somethings I could do to the code in Grav to make it perform quicker but I am very happy with how it currently performs on Azure, especially against my old WordPress site.
I am using Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services) to store my source files, which is free and private. That is then deployed on an Azure Web App (in East US using a B1 instance). I have the free Cloudflare plan in front to help with Caching and performance. That costs in the region of £40 (UK pounds) a month. Maybe pricey but I like the functionality it gives me.
If I run the S1 plan for about £54 a month I can get automatic auto scale for my website to deal with traffic and I also get access to additional instances where I can run development environments.
You can store your source files in places such as Github, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, OneDrive, Dropbox, a local Git Repository or an external repository, then when you spin up your Azure Web App you point it to it and whenever you make a commit the web app will automatically find it and deploy it for you.
I used the free and shared plans on Azure when I was developing my site, they were fine for that purpose but performance wasn’t what I wanted it to be.
Hope that helps some, happy to answer any more questions you might have. 
The free tier on Azure does have some limitations but for small sites it has it’s uses. I am running my user group’s Grav website on a shared Azure tier (https://www.gaug.co.uk), it’s a basic site but as you can see not slow. Costs about £7 (UK pounds) a month.
If you have some questions on the Azure pricing calculator happy to help.
I’ll definitely have a look at writing something for the official documentation, thanks for the idea!
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Thanks very much @techielassfor sharing all that info! Storing the source files in Git and then auto deployment is an aspect that interests me the most - I use Git Sync for all of my open education projects in Grav (where I also auto-generate a URL to go directly to that page in the Git repo - like on this page https://demo.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-open-matter-course-hub/resources ) to do that type of thing on other Web servers too.
I am always looking for other hosting options of Grav + Git for my fellow tech-savvy educators🙂
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I’ve created a basic tutorial on how to get started with Grav on Azure - https://github.com/weeyin83/grav-learn/blob/develop/pages/09.webservers-hosting/03.paas/04.azure/docs.md
Hopefully it’ll get pulled into the official documentation soon.
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That’s awesome @techielass, thanks so much for contributing that!
Hi, @techielass
I hope this blog is help for you
Thanks for the link @sailaja, however that blog doesn’t cover anything to do with how you would add in the Application Insights code to the Grav code to make them work together.