Enhancing Workflow Observability with Open Telemetry in Azure Logic Apps

Struggling to Monitor Your Logic App Workflows End-to-End?

Azure Logic Apps are a powerful tool for automating business workflows across services. But as these workflows grow in size and complexity, so do the challenges in tracking, debugging, and optimizing them.

The built-in monitoring options, while helpful often don’t provide full visibility. This leaves teams scrambling to understand failures, bottlenecks, or performance issues.

Here’s the good news: OpenTelemetry can change that.

In this post, you’ll learn how to gain complete observability into your Logic Apps workflows using OpenTelemetry, the industry-standard framework for telemetry data.

Why Observability Matters in Azure Logic Apps

Logic Apps connect multiple services , APIs, databases, emails, on-prem systems, and more. But as you stitch these workflows together, it becomes harder to:

• a) Understand what happens at each step
• b) Trace failures across services
• c) Optimize performance or detect regressions

While Azure provides diagnostics via Monitor and Application Insights, they often produce fragmented data. These tools lack native support for distributed tracing, which is essential when workflows span many components.

That’s where OpenTelemetry helps.

With it, you can gather:

• a) Traces: visualize step-by-step execution
• b) Metrics: measure performance and error rates
• c) Logs: add context to trace events

Together, these three “pillars of observability” give you actionable insights into your Logic App’s behavior.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is an open-source standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. It supports multiple platforms, Azure, AWS, GCP and can export data to tools like Application Insights, Jaeger, or Prometheus.

With OpenTelemetry, you can:

• a) Track how a request moves across services
• b) Measure latency and bottlenecks
• c) Detect and fix issues before customers notice

It ensures a consistent observability strategy across your cloud-native systems — including Logic Apps.

How to Integrate OpenTelemetry with Azure Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps don’t yet support OpenTelemetry out of the box. But with a smart setup, you can still plug them into an OpenTelemetry pipeline.

🛠️ Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Enable Diagnostic Settings
   • -In your Logic App, go to Diagnostic Settings.
   • -Enable logging for workflows, triggers, and actions.
2. Export Logs
   • -Send logs to Log Analytics, Event Hub, or Storage Account.
3. Connect with OpenTelemetry Collector
   • -Deploy a collector (container or VM).
   • -Ingest logs/metrics from Azure Monitor.
   • -Export to your preferred backend (e.g., Application Insights or Jaeger).
4. Correlate Traces
   • -Use operation_Id or custom headers to link Logic App events with downstream services like Azure Functions, API Management, or Cosmos DB.

Real Example: Order Processing with Observability

Imagine this:

• 1. A Logic App receives an order.
• 2. It calls an Azure Function for inventory.
• 3. Then it hits an external shipping API via API Management.

Without OpenTelemetry:

• 1. Hard to know where the failure occurred
• 2. Long debugging time
• 3. Poor visibility into how long each step takes

With OpenTelemetry:

• 1. Full trace of the order lifecycle
• 2. Visual graphs showing step-by-step execution
• 3. Immediate detection of errors and slowdowns

This means faster resolution, less guesswork, and a better customer experience.

✅ Use correlation IDs across services
✅ Add custom dimensions to enrich telemetry
✅ Configure sampling to control trace volume
✅ Monitor latency thresholds for each Logic App step
✅ Log business-critical metadata (e.g., Order ID, region)

Start Small, See Big Results

Observability is no longer optional. It’s a must-have for teams building scalable, resilient workflows.

Here’s your action plan:

• 1. Start by enabling diagnostic logs on one Logic App
• 2. Route those logs to Azure Monitor
• 3. Connect with an OpenTelemetry Collector
• 4. Visualize the data using Application Insights