A number of important changes are being introduced to AzureWatch this weekend (March 16th):

• Ability to execute rules only after a sustained period of time
  • This feature allows for much better control of the scaling process.  For example, in certain situations it can be far more effective to scale when sustained load is over a certain threshold rather than try to predict what a moving average looks like.  It is important to know that if a rule is configured with a sustained time delay, it will only be executed after continuously being evaluated to TRUE for the specified period of time.
• Ability to send ON and OFF alerts (a single ON email when alert evaluates to TRUE, and a single OFF email when it evaluates to FALSE)
  • This feature reduces spam when a certain rule's condition is continuously TRUE.  It also simplifies configuration since ON/OFF alerts no longer require throttling.  Unless modified, existing Alerts will work as they currently do.
• Separation of Alerts from Management Actions (rules that notify will be separated from rules that execute scale actions, shutdowns, restarts, etc.)
  • This feature is relatively important as it may impact existing rule sets.  Going forward, rules that are Alerts will be evaluated separately from rules that are Management Actions.  When evaluating rules, all Alerts that qualify for execution will be evaluated and acted upon, not just the first one. Management Actions will continue to be evaluated until the first rule that qualifies for execution. Users who currently rely on Alerts to control execution of their Management Actions will want to revisit their scaling configurations.  We do expect percentage of such users to be either very small or non-existent.
  • After the upgrade, we plan to monitor AzureWatch's email queues and switch highly spamming Alerts to have ON/OFF logic.  Impacted customers will be notified.

While we expect minimum impact during or after the upgrade, we want to be transparent with our users: this is probably the most significant change to the Rules engine since the inception of AzureWatch. If you have any concerns, please contact Paraleap support team

We are currently working on changing the way alerts work in AzureWatch.  At this time, Rules for a monitored resource, that trigger either Alerts or Management Actions are ALL evaluated together in a single loop.  When a single Rule is evaluated to TRUE, all further evaluation of rules for that resource stops.  This will be changing going forward.  ALL rules that trigger alerts will be evaluated, regardless of their success or failure.  Only rules that contain Management Actions will be evaluated to the first TRUE rule.

Furthermore, we will be adding the following two options to the Rule engine:

1) Ability to send ON/OFF notifications for Alerts.  This means that when a condition for a Rule is TRUE, AzureWatch will send out an "Alert ON" alert and subsequently when the condition for a Rule no longer is true, AzureWatch will send out an "Alert OFF" alert.

2) Ability to trigger Rules (Alerts or Management Actions) only after a sustained period of time.  This means that when a condition is TRUE, a particular Rule will not be immediately acted upon.  Only if Rule's condition has been evaluated as TRUE for the specified period of time, will it trigger it's Alert or Management Action.

We are pleased to announce the release of AzurePing: a free Azure resource-monitoring utility.  AzurePing is a simple Windows Service that pings any number of Azure Storage resources, SQL (Azure) databases, and web URL's on a continuous basis.  Any errors are logged through log4net framework via a variety of appenders, such as email, SQL, flat files, Trace, etc.  For those not familiar with log4net, it is a popular open-source logging framework that can store logging entries to a variety of extendable appenders.

To find more information about AzurePing, visit our website at http://www.paraleap.com/azureping

And please help us spread the word about AzurePing!