Application assessment with GitHub Copilot app modernization

This article shows you how to use assessment capabilities in GitHub Copilot app modernization to maximize the value of your application modernization process.

Overview

Application assessment is a critical first step in your modernization journey. This article shows you how to configure assessments for different scenarios, work with assessment reports, and manage assessment data throughout your modernization process.

Configure before running assessment

You can open the .appmod/.appcat/assessment-config.json file in your project to edit the configuration for application assessment to specify your target Azure service if it exists. For the first run of the assessment, the configuration file will be generated automatically.

Configuration properties

You can edit this file to configure the application assessment. Any changes saved to this file will be applied the next time you run the assessment.

The configurable arguments:

Target: The Azure compute service to run the apps on. Select Any if you haven't decided which one to use and later you can choose and compare on the assessment report. By default, it's set as Any.

Examples

The following provide two examples of proper configurations:

• Example one: You'd like to migrate your apps to Azure but haven't decided on the target compute service yet

{
  "appcat": {
    "target": "Any"
  }
}

• Example two: You'd like to migrate your apps to App Service Linux and want to understand what issues need to be fixed.

{
  "appcat": {
    "target": "AppService.Linux"
  }
}

After the assessment runs, the interactive dashboard opens automatically to provide comprehensive analysis results. When you configure the target Azure service as Any, you can switch between them to compare migration approaches and view service-specific recommendations. If you configure a specific target Azure service, you can only see one Azure service in the dropdown list.

Interpreting assessment report

The assessment reports provide comprehensive analysis results to help you understand your application's readiness for Azure migration and modernization. This section guides you through the report structure and helps you interpret the findings to make informed migration decisions.

Report structure overview

The assessment report consists of several key sections:

• Application Information: Basic information about your application including project numbers, frameworks, build tools, and target Azure service.
• Issue Summary: Overview of migration issues categorized by domain with criticality percentages.
• Issues: Provides a concise summary of all issues that require attention.

Issues

The issues section provides a categorized list of various aspects of Cloud Readiness that you need to address to successfully migrate the application to Azure. The following tables describe the Domain and Criticality values:

For more information, you can expand each reported issue by selecting the title. The report provides the following information:

• A list of files where the incidents occurred, along with the number of code lines impacted. If the file is a .NET source file, then selecting the file line number directs you to the corresponding source report.
• A detailed description of the issue. This description outlines the problem, provides any known solutions, and references supporting documentation regarding either the issue or resolution.

Operate assessment report

Effective report management enables collaboration, maintains assessment history, and integrates with existing workflows.

Import assessment report

Besides running the assessment directly in GitHub Copilot app modernization, you can also import assessment reports. The report can come from a .NET AppCAT CLI result, GitHub Copilot app modernization exported report, or app context file from Dr.Migrate.

You can trigger importing a report by typing "import assessment report" in the chat when you enter the Modernize agent, or select the Import button in the assessment dashboard to import the report from the file explorer.

Export assessment report

In the assessment dashboard, you can view the issues detected by AppCAT and choose the migration solution. You can export the report and share it with others. This way, other people don't need to run the assessment themselves and can import the report to view the assessment and migration decisions directly.

You can select the Export button in the assessment dashboard to export the report to the file explorer.

Next Steps

• Predefined Tasks
• Frequently Asked Questions