AzureWatch alerts and other email communication is down (RESOLVED)

20. September 2015 00:04 by author Igor Papirov

AzureWatch's email provider (Amazon SES) has without warning suspended our account.  At this time, AzureWatch is not sending any emails out.  Portal, monitoring, auto-scaling, and other automation services continue to run.

CloudMonix email services were also impacted but have now been restored due to less complexity involved. 

 

UPDATE: On 2015/09/20 - email services were restored approximately 24hrs after initial outage.



AzureWatch Portal - Outage

8. June 2015 02:24 by author Igor Papirov

AzureWatch experienced an outage with its Portal/Website.  Monitoring/auto-scaling services were not impacted.  Outage lasted for approximately 6hrs



AzureWatch Monitoring - Static IP Update and Diagnostics Extension bug fixed

6. June 2015 00:00 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs Fixed

Moderate - Diagnostics Extensions for Cloud Services deployed with SDK v2.5+ and with a period "." in their Role names should now properly be enabled for Diagnostics

Moderate - New Static IP implemented for monitoring services.  Learn more here.



Azure and AzureWatch Outage

19. November 2014 15:18 by author Igor Papirov

Outages:

  • Major: AzureWatch alongside Azure has suffered a major outage that lasted for approximately 1.5hrs (from 6:48pm to 8:23pm, Central time, 11/18/2014). Outage was related to general network timeouts within Azure data centers and prevented AzureWatch properly performing monitoring.


AzureWatch - API integration enabled

29. October 2014 13:57 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: API integration is now available

Bug fixes:

  • Minor: Emails generated by the portal (Monitoring Stopped/Started and Password Resets) are now working again


AzureWatch Management Portal - Sustain Condition checkbox is now persisting

23. July 2014 00:55 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Minor: Rules are now properly persisting "Sustain Condition" checkbox


AzureWatch Management Portal: Dashboard hotfix and UI-related updates

10. July 2014 00:00 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Moderate: Issue that prevented users from seeing dashboards with Roles that contain spaces in their names has been fixed
  • Minor: UI styles for all Rule and Metric configuration dialogs have been updated and enhanced


AzureWatch Processing - Hotfix for Service Dashboard alerts deployed

20. June 2014 04:12 by author Igor Papirov

Hot Fixes:

  • Major: Due to RSS changes within Windows Azure Service Dashboard, AzureWatch monitoring functionality of the Azure Service Dashboard has been disabled until further notice


AzureWatch Monitoring: Email flooding with Service Dashboard Notifications

20. June 2014 03:43 by author AzureWatch Administration

Hot Fixes:

  • Major: Due to RSS changes within Windows Azure Service Dashboard, AzureWatch was flooding customers mailboxes with service alerts regarding the dashboard. This issue is currently being hot-fixed


AzureWatch Management Portal - Historic Reports and other improvements

9. June 2014 00:00 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: Daily emails with metric reports can now be scheduled and customized
  • Moderate: Users can now unsubscribe and purge their data without filing a support ticket
  • Minor: RSS feeds can now be disabled
  • Minor: maximm length of rule names has been increased from 50 characters to 255


AzureWatch Management Portal: Major redesign of UX for Historic Reports

19. May 2014 22:09 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Major: Historic Reports have been redesigned. More updates are coming


AzureWatch Management Portal: Setup Wizard improvements

1. May 2014 23:17 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Moderate: Setup Wizard now has Express and Advanced modes
  • Minor: Rules can now be disabled via a checkbox

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: Mobile app and site now properly display metrics to report on


AzureWatch Monitoring: bugs fixed with certain instance-based rules

24. April 2014 00:00 by author AzureWatch Administration

Issues Resolved:

  • Minor: non-instance-specific metrics (such as queue counts, instance counts, etc) are now available to be used in instance-specific Rules/alerts
  • Minor: InstanceName variable is properly working in instance-based rules
  • Minor: Rule's comments are now showing up in alert text


AzureWatch Management Portal: Minor Setup Wizard improvements

20. April 2014 01:00 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Minor: Setup Wizard now allows to check ON/OFF all items in it's grids


Cross-reference metrics in rules from across different resources

7. April 2014 02:47 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Moderate: Rules engine now contains a set of functions that allows metric evaluation from different resources


Minor bug fixes with OFF alerts

3. April 2014 13:39 by author AzureWatch Administration

Issues Resolved:

  • Minor: OFF alerts were sometimes being sent out without corresponding ON alerts
  • Minor: Alerts now show all dates properly in users local time


AzureWatch Monitoring: Alerts on Event Logs for Cloud Services are now working again

24. March 2014 09:48 by author AzureWatch Administration

Issues Resolved:

  • Moderate: a issue preventing alerts based on Event Logs from Cloud Services from being sent, has been resolved


AzureWatch Monitoring: Reboot actions are now working again

22. March 2014 14:26 by author AzureWatch Administration

Issues Resolved:

  • Moderate: rule-based management actions that are not scaling commands, ie: reboots, shutdown/start-ups, etc. are now working again
  • Minor: CountOf_ prefix now works for aggregate metrics with 0 captured data points


AzureWatch Monitoring and Portal: Major enhancements to Alerts and Rules Engine

16. March 2014 12:00 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Major: Rules that trigger alerts are no longer mixed together with rules that execute management actions
  • Major: Ability to execute rules after a sustained period of time
  • Moderate: Abilty to send one alert when rule evaluates to TRUE and only subsequently one alert when it evaluates to FALSE


AzureWatch Management Portal: Support for Multiple Users & new Invoicing screen

2. March 2014 12:35 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:

  • Major: Ability to add/manage multiple users assigned to a particular AzureWatch account. Users have three permission levels: Administrative, Regular, and ReadOnly
  • Moderate: New Invoice screen shows invoices available for downloading for those customers who not only need receipts for payment transactions but also invoices in order to propery expense AzureWatch bills
  • Minor: Dashlets for non-monitoring resources are no longer showing on the main dashboard


AzureWatch Management Portal: Support Tickets Link works again

26. February 2014 11:48 by author AzureWatch Administration

Issues Resolved:

  • Minor: link to view and submit support tickets is now working again


AzureWatch Monitoring: Stabilty issues resolved

20. February 2014 05:31 by author AzureWatch Administration

Issues Resolved:

  • Moderate: monitoring of certain customer accounts was occasionally delayed due to various stabillity issues.
  • Moderate: querying for performance counters of Virtual Machines not enabled for monitoring should no longer be happening


AzureWatch Monitoring: Intermittent errors when monitoring Storage Accounts & other

10. February 2014 15:58 by author AzureWatch Administration

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: when monitoring storage accounts from multiple subscriptions, AzureWatch would intermittently not be able to monitor storage accounts from all subscriptions properly
  • Moderate: AzureWatch will now only wait up to 10 seconds for virtual machines to respond to powershell commands to retrieve data


AzureWatch Management Portal: Fixes to Publish Changes on Role Configuration

4. February 2014 00:00 by author AzureWatch Administration

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: it is now again possible change selection of which Event Logs will be tracked by AzureWatch
  • Moderate: it is now possible to delete any existing aggregate metrics


AzureWatch Management Portal: Wizard's Rule Names Fixed

30. January 2014 00:00 by author AzureWatch Administration

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: Certain monitoring rules created by the Setup Wizard defaulted to name 'ruleName'. This has been fixed and existing rules have been changed retroactively.


AzureWatch: Receive notifications for official Windows Azure Service Dashboard

22. January 2014 23:25 by author AzureWatch Administration

New Features:



AzureWatch Management Portal: Azure Website Metrics

16. January 2014 23:35 by author AzureWatch Administration

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: It is now again possible to add/edit Aggregate Metric definitions for Azure Websites metrics


AzureWatch Monitoring: Outage Resolution (UP) alerts are not being sent

11. January 2014 01:39 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: AzureWatch will now send Outage Resolved (UP) alerts again.


AzureWatch Mobile: Graphs are fixed

10. January 2014 15:26 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: Screens showing charts have been fixed in Mobile site and on the Android application


AzureWatch: Active monitoring of Windows Event Logs for Virtual Machines

9. January 2014 11:18 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: Ability to monitor Application, System and Security Windows Event logs (functionality in beta) for Virtual Machines

Bugs Fixed:

  • Minor: AzureStore subscriptions can now be deleted again


AzureWatch: Event Log Monitoring for Cloud Services

4. January 2014 02:41 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: Ability to monitor Application and System Windows Event logs for Cloud Services (functionality in beta)
  • Moderate: Ability to call certain string-based functions inside Rules. ie: Contains, StartsWith, EndsWith
  • Moderate: Ability to interogate Instance Name and Windows Event Log properties inside a Rule

Bugs Fixed:

  • Moderate: Users can now save User Profile screen again


AzureWatch Management Portal: Export to PDF fixed

26. December 2013 12:06 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: The resulting PDF from an export a historical report is no longer broken into multiple pages in width


AzureWatch Management Portal: Setup Wizard, Dashboard improvements and support for ServiceBus Subscriptions

25. December 2013 09:18 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: Upgrades across all internal frameworks, improved caching
  • Major: Setup Wizard now supports a number of server-based templates for pre-creating a vast amount of rules and metrics
  • Moderate: Ability to manage individual instances from the dashboard (Start/Stop/Reboot/Reimage)
  • Moderate: Ability to monitor and auto-scale by Service Bus Topic Subscriptions


AzureWatch Monitoring: maintenance release ahead of Service Bus Subscription monitoring

25. December 2013 04:02 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • No customer impact expected
  • Major: Upgrades across all internal frameworks, improved caching
  • Minor: Enabling support for Service Bus Subscription monitoring


AzureWatch Management Portal: Removal of R/G/Y obsolete textboxes

4. December 2013 13:01 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Minor: Adding of aggregate metrics no longer shows legacy Red/Green/Orange textbox with thresholds
  • Minor: Better messaging about adding of custom performance counters during setup of aggregate counters


AzureWatch Management Portal: New Setup Wizard & Dashboard Improvements

3. December 2013 13:44 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: New, improved and better looking setup wizard
  • Minor: Dashboard improvements include tooltips with name of the metric on Activity view, number of units on the dashlet, and ability to see alerts and scale-actions for dashlets that have no metric charts


AzureWatch RSS Feeds: Latest data only

17. November 2013 04:56 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs resolved:

  • Minor: RSS feed updates now only display the latest set of metrics.


AzureWatch Management Portal: Help screens & validation messaging cleanup

15. November 2013 01:11 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs resolved:

  • Minor: Better messaging around failures to validate the download of metrics from Virtual Machines

New Features:

  • Minor: Better help screens for the Dashboard, Historical Reports and Cloud Services configuration


AzureWatch Daily Emails - Hotfix

13. November 2013 00:13 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs resolved:

  • Major: All customers received incomplete daily charts. The issue has been resolved and updated emails sent out.  


AzureWatch Monitoring: Virtual Machines monitoring hotfix

11. November 2013 07:03 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs resolved:

  • Moderate: Customers should no longer be charged for monitoring of Stopped and Deallocated virtual machines
  • Moderate: Issue fixed for certain customers whose processing of metrics for Availability Sets was not working
  • Minor: Customers should no longer receive Successfull Range Change scaling emails for stand-alone virtual machines. Instance ranges do not apply to virtual machines


AzureWatch Monitoring: Hotfix to address intermittent gaps in monitoring

6. November 2013 15:09 by author Igor Papirov

Bugs resolved:

  • Minor: A hotfix has been deployed that minimizes monitoring outage timeouts as experienced by certain customers


AzureWatch Management Portal: New dashboard is now live

3. November 2013 23:55 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: The new dashboard has been promoted to "Live" mode. Legacy dashboard is still available
  • Moderate: A quick status bar has been added to new dashboard to quickly show users all of the events that have happened in the last 1hr


AzureWatch Management Portal: Preview of the new Dashboard is released

30. October 2013 03:55 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: New dashboard has been released in "Preview" mode


AzureWatch Monitoring: Back end services restructured

28. October 2013 09:44 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: Data storage has been restructured in support of newly redesigned and soon to be released dashboard


AzureWatch: Resolving extraneous Scaling Failure alerts

1. October 2013 01:32 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: During intermittent timeouts of Azure Service Management API, AzureWatch should no longer attempt to issue scaling events and send out failed "Instance Count Range Check" alerts


AzureWatch Outage: SQL Azure issues

19. September 2013 04:53 by author Igor Papirov

Production Issue:

  • Severe: We're experiencing connectivity issues to our back-end databases hosted in SQL Azure. At this time monitoring and access to AzureWatch management portal are impacted. We apologize for this issue and have contacted Microsoft regarding resolution.
  • Outage duration: ~1hr


AzureWatch Management Portal: Responsive UI

18. September 2013 14:03 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: font size automatically adjusts with the size of the browser
  • Minor: SQL Azure databases are auto-populated during detection of Azure resources.  Password must still be provided by the user


AzureWatch: Basic Support for Windows Azure China

27. August 2013 13:41 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: Initial support for Windows Azure China introduced.  Functionality is strictly alpha.  Known issues exist in retrieving queue-based metric data,


AzureWatch: Queue metrics have been restored

27. August 2013 09:59 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: AzureWatch was unable to pull in queue counts for a number of customers after a recent upgrade. This has been fixed


Service Degradation: Auto-scaling

27. August 2013 00:37 by author Igor Papirov

Production Issue:

  • Severe: A number of customers are reporting lack of expected auto-scaling actions. We've tracked the problem down to a mis-configured deployment of AzureWatch monitors.  Total time of the service degradation: approximately 10hrs.