AzureWatch Monitoring: Count of {0} instances in Service Configuration does not match actual instance count deployed.

18. August 2013 15:18 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Efforts have been made to stop or minimize he amount of scaling error alerts sent from AzureWatch.  


Throttling of outage alerts

16. August 2013 13:08 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Minor: Resource outage alerts will only be sent out on the 2nd consequent failure.  Resource outage alerts will now display duration of the outage.


Virtual Machines performance counters bug fixed

16. August 2013 02:52 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Retrieval of performance counters from Virtual Machines was not working in certain cases. This issue has been corrected.


AzureWatch: Production issue, intermittent outages resolved

15. August 2013 00:06 by author Igor Papirov

Production Issue:

  • Moderate: We have placed a temporary fix to limit the amount of connections to our SQL Azure databases in order to prevent the throttling that was occurring. Over the next days and weeks we will be working on a more permanent fix


AzureWatch: Production issue, Intermittent timeouts & outages

14. August 2013 21:13 by author Igor Papirov

Production Issue:

  • Moderate: We are currently experiencing intermittent outages with our SQL Azure environment.  Due to this, we're experiencing occasional timeouts or slowdowns on our AzureWatch Management Portal.  Furthermore, we're experiencing occasional monitoring cycle errors.  We apologize for this issue and are working with Microsoft to mitigate the problem


AzureWatch Alerts: Smarter Outage Alerts

14. August 2013 13:08 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: Resource outage alerts no longer spam every minute when the resource is down.  Now, the alerts go out when the outage is detected and when it is resolved.  Text of the alerts have changed.

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Username/Password now appear on Virtual Machine and Availability Set configuration screens


AzureWatch Management Portal: New Scheduling Features

12. August 2013 14:00 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: Ability to set different upper and lower instance limits by time of day
  • Moderate: Ability to import all configuration settings (rules, metrics, etc.) from one cloud Role into another
  • Moderate: Customers who have multiple AzureWatch accounts can now easily switch between them from the Management Portal

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: "Show Available Variables" button was not working for non-configured units


Support for auto-scaling & monitoring of Azure VM's (IaaS)

27. July 2013 13:53 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: It is now possible to monitor, heal, manage and monitor Azure VM's and Availability Sets.  This functionality is soft-launched is considered to be beta
  • Minor: UI has new icons
  • Minor: Setup wizard has new rules for memory monitoring and rebooting based on low-ram conditions
  • Minor: Historical reports no longer randomly error with an expired session state exception


AzureWatch Management Portal - Wizard changes during scale-down

10. June 2013 03:17 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Minor: Due to Windows Azure moving to by-minute billing, Setup Wizard no longer configures sample scale-down rules to work only during the end of the clock hour.


AzureWatch Management Portal - AzureWatch usage history

30. May 2013 04:04 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: Users can now view their AzureWatch usage history going all the way back to 2011.  The data is available on the User Profile screen


AzureWatch Management Portal - Bug fixes

29. May 2013 00:54 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Users no longer should be getting occasional Error 500 during displaying of diagnostic data (ie: Event Viewer logs, Traces, etc)
  • Minor: Switch time from the drop-down in diagnostic data screen should no longer reset the date to year 2000
  • Minor: Setup Wizard window has been increased to accommodate longer resource names


AzureWatch Management Portal: Deletions are working again

19. May 2013 04:20 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Major: Users are once again able to save changes after deleting configuration items such as metrics or rules.  We apologize for this inconvenience.  We've seem to hit an obscure bug with Entity Framework and believe have resolved it after upgrading to latest version of EF.   If you happen to notice any issues with saving or loading of your data in the Management Portal, please contact support so that we can take steps and correct the situation.


AzureWatch: Support for Auto-Reboot/Reimage of instances and additional alert options

17. May 2013 12:44 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: In addition to scaling up or down, AzureWatch can now reboot or reimage instances via its advanced aggregation and rule-evaluation engine.  This is useful for resource-leaking servers.
  • Major: AzureWatch can now send alerts based on rules that execute on a single-server level (instead of aggregating all the data for a Role).
  • Moderate: AzureWatch now supports sending alerts to multiple mailboxes.  Furthermore, users can customize each rule and forward alerts from a particular rule to additional set of mailboxes.

 



AzureWatch Management Portal - Hotfix release

14. May 2013 08:16 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Users are once again able to save changes after deleting configuration items such as metrics or rules
  • Moderate: Users are once again able to pick any Storage or Service Bus queue for monitoring

 



AzureWatch - Support for monitoring of *multiple* Azure subscriptions under one account!

12. May 2013 14:13 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: AzureWatch now supports monitoring multiple Azure subscriptions under one AzureWatch account.  Entering Subscription ID's into AzureWatch can be done either through Setup Wizard or Azure-Specific Settings screen.
  • Major: AzureWatch no longer requires that every monitored instance sends its diagnostic data to a single storage account.  Users can now use any number of storage accounts to host diagnostic data.  AzureWatch will automatically sense which storage accounts hold diagnostic data.

Important Notes:

  • Please make sure that AzureWatch Management Certificate (public key in .cer file) is uploaded to every monitored Subscription under Windows Azure Portal's Management Certificates section.
  • Unfortunately, we do not have an automated way to merge existing AzureWatch accounts together.  Customers who have multiple AzureWatch accounts and who wish to combine those accounts together will have to do so manually.


AzureWatch Monitoring: Production issue, False Azure Storage Outage alerts

11. May 2013 11:18 by author Igor Papirov

Production Issue:

  • Moderate: A production-level issue has caused one of our servers to begin sending false alerts regarding outages in Azure Storage.  The error has been corrected.  Duration of the issue: 33 minutes.  Start: 05/10/2013 8:39pm CST, End: 05/10/2013 9:11pm CST.  We apologize for the inconvenience.


AzureWatch - minor improvements and bug fixes

5. May 2013 05:33 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Minor: When monitoring resources such as SQL Azure, Storage, and URLs, AzureWatch will trigger intermittent timeout alerts much less frequently due to improved retry logic

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: AzureWatch Management Portal will no longer prompt to save changes when no changes need to be saved


AzureWatch Management Portal - Explorer performance improvements

23. April 2013 23:53 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Minor: Performance of navigational explorer has been improved.  Instead of querying Azure Management API every time the explorer is displayed, the data is now cached for a day and users have an option to force an update to their Roles and Websites by clicking on "Rescan Azure" in the menu bar

Bug Fixes:

  • N/A


AzureWatch Monitoring - Scalability improvements

23. April 2013 06:40 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: In anticipation of major influx of new users due to Global Windows Azure Bootcamp promotion, caching and locking improvements have been made to monitoring infrasrtucture

Bug Fixes:

  • N/A


AzureWatch Management Portal - Default scaling rules for Websites

11. April 2013 05:20 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • N/A

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: Update to default scaling rules for Azure Websites in the Setup Wizard.  Approximate CPU time per second is now compared against 0.7 and 0.2 instead of 70 and 20, as the CPU time per second is a fraction, rather than a percentage value


AzureWatch Monitoring: Bug fixes

4. April 2013 21:39 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • N/A

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Approximate metrics per second for Azure Websites are now being properly calculated and extrapolated
  • Minor: Scaling alerts show current and requested instance counts again


AzureWatch Management Portal - Websites-related bug fixes

3. April 2013 12:16 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • N/A

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Setup Wizard now correctly sets up default rules for Azure Websites
  • Minor: Dashboard tiles now correctly display Azure Websites icon
  • Minor: Dashboard no longer allows clicking on Azure Websites while causing an error


AzureWatch - Soft launch of Azure Websites support

2. April 2013 22:36 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: Support for monitoring and auto-scaling of Azure Websites
  • Major: Refactoring of scaling and rule-evaluation engines in order to support Azure Websites
  • Major: Main Paraleap's site (www.paraleap.com) redesigned
  • Minor: Rule notification emails contain more information about rule that was triggered

Bug Fixes:

  • N/A

Known Bugs & Issues:

  • Moderate: Setup wizard does not correctly configure Azure Websites yet
  • Moderate: Estimates (Approximate metrics) for changes in performance data for Azure Websites are not yet accurately calculating
  • Minor: Scaling alerts no longer show instance counts that were executed
  • Minor: Clicking on an Azure Website tile on AzureWatch dashboard does not work

 



AzureWatch Monitoring - Planned upgrade rolled back

1. April 2013 18:23 by author Igor Papirov

A planned upgrade to AzureWatch Main website, Management Portal and Monitoring Service has been rolled back after 10 minutes of running in production due to a discovered issue.  After the upgrade, a number of customers began receiving false alerts as AzureWatch attempted to scale their no-longer existing (but configured for scaling) deployments.  Prior to the upgrade, AzureWatch used to simply ignore deployments that were no longer present, even if it was configured to monitor and scale them.

While the discovered issue had no bearing on production use and monitoring, the amount of false alerts sent to customers mail boxes every minute was deemed inappropriate and upgrade has been rolled back until a fix can be applied.

We apologize for the inconvenience.



AzureWatch Management Portal - Support for monitoring of SSL certificates

2. March 2013 13:22 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: AzureWatch can now track a new metric when monitoring SSL-based URL's, it is the number of days until the SSL certificate expires.  Once the metric is captured it can be used in Rules to generate a notification alert

Bug Fixes:

  • N/A

 



AzureWatch Management Portal - Setup Wizard bugs addressed

27. February 2013 14:00 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • N/A

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: Bug preventing adding of new storage accounts to Setup Wizard has been fixed

 



AzureWatch Monitoring - Azure-related Outage

23. February 2013 06:09 by author Igor Papirov

We are seeing world-wide connectivity errors connecting to Azure Storage.  Problems appear to be caused by an expired Azure SSL certificate

This Azure-related outage is impacting AzureWatch's ability to monitor customers subscriptions

 



AzureWatch Monitoring - Services restored

22. February 2013 23:58 by author Igor Papirov

All Azure-related services have been restored approximately 10 hours after the Azure Storage-related outage started.  AzureWatch was sending alerts to customers who monitor their Storage Accounts and who have enabled the "Alert on Failure" option.  During the outage, AzureWatch Management Portal was unavailable.

All AzureWatch related services are now running normally



AzureWatch Management Portal - SQL Federations setup

20. February 2013 10:52 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • N/A

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Bug preventing definition of SQL Azure Federations in certain situations has been fixed

 



AzureWatch Management Portal - Historical Reports fixed

12. February 2013 23:28 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • N/A

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: All tracked metrics can now be plotted under the Historical Reports again

 



AzureWatch Management Portal - Support for Service Bus Topics

10. February 2013 11:18 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: AzureWatch now supports monitoring and scaling rules based on Active Message Count within the Service Bus Topics (in addition to queue support released previously)

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Number of customers were reporting problems correctly saving rules with scheduled time ranges.  We have replaced Telerik's time-picker control with less sophisticated but more reliable text-boxes.  Scheduled rules should now persist their start/stop settings correctly

 



AzureWatch Monitoring - Service Bus Queue counts & data import optimization

6. February 2013 14:13 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: AzureWatch now analyzes Active Message Count within the Service Bus queues instead of the total message count
  • Moderate: AzureWatch no longer imports all the possible metrics for monitored endpoints, but only those that are being aggregated.  Any metrics that do not have associated aggregations can no longer be viewed from the Historical Reports section

Bug Fixes:

  • None


AzureWatch Management Portal - New Support Features

1. February 2013 11:42 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: AzureWatch now integrates with Zendesk!  Users can open and monitor support tickets via the link from the portal
  • Major: AzureWatch now integrates with Olark Chat! Users can now initiate a chat request with one of the engineers who will occasionally monitor the chat channel

Bug Fixes:

  • N/A


AzureWatch Management Portal - Bug fixes

28. January 2013 11:18 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Setup Wizard now properly instruments Compute Instances
  • Minor: Setup Wizard now properly requests SubscriptionId & Certificate setup if only Azure Storage accounts are requested to be monitored
  • Minor: Start/Stop Monitoring functionality should now be correctly working in IE
  • Minor: "Unpublished changes will be lost" warning should now work on all screens properly


AzureWatch Management Portal - Publish Changes

14. January 2013 08:33 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: AzureWatch Management Portal now prompts the user when (s)he tries to navigate from the screen without saving the changes

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: a number of AzureStorage-related screens in the Management Portal errored out when the user did not specify a valid SubscriptionId and uploaded Azure management certificate.  This now should be fixed


AzureWatch Management Portal - Custom Performance Counters

7. January 2013 05:04 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: periods (.) are now allowed during definition of customer performance counter aggregates
  • Minor: added tooltip for definition of custom performance counters


AzureWatch Management Portal - Documentation explorer

26. December 2012 13:43 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: Legacy AzureWatch Control Panel will no longer work and is no longer supported
  • Moderate: Added an explorer branch with AzureWatch Help/Documentation.  More documentation is forthcoming
  • Minor: link to this release blog has been added to the Management Portal's toolbar

Bug Fixes:

  •  Minor: Fixed minor sorting of Rules issues when adding new Rules


AzureWatch Monitoring - Change to the way Azure Storage is monitored

24. December 2012 14:03 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: We have altered the way we monitor Azure Storage accounts.  Previously, during every monitoring cycle we executed a number of actions against Azure Storage accounts that were not very useful to monitor but have added a degree of unpredictability to monitoring results.  This caused us to send out a number of alerts to our customers for conditions that were rarely impacting their overall production environments.  In particular, during every monitoring cycle, we measured the time it took to count containers, queues and tables, as well as execute "CreateIfNotExists" command against table, queue and blob storage.  These commands typically do not execute within predictable time periods, fall within the Azure Storage SLAs that deal with transaction counts per second, or are in general useful to monitor. We have thus, removed these commands from the time measurements and now only monitor the time it takes to add & remove rows from table storage, add/remove messages from the queue and the time it takes to add/delete a file from blob storage.

Bug Fixes:

  • None


AzureWatch Management Portal - Support for Service Bus Queues

24. December 2012 13:53 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: Azure Compute Services (Worker and Web Roles) can now be auto-scaled or alerted based on the size of Service Bus Queues
  • Moderate: SQL Azure and Federations monitoring now supports capture of a new measurement: Active Query Count.  This allows users to monitor how many actively executing queries are running against their SQL Azure databases.

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Fixed occasional failing of adding multiple new Rules
  • Minor: Setup Wizard now accepts names of the URL's from the first time
  • Minor: Enhanced validation of Rules to prevent invalid formulas, long names and descriptions


AzureWatch Daily Reports - Re-enabled

21. December 2012 00:01 by author Igor Papirov

Outage Resolution:

  • Moderate: Data generation issue with Daily Performance Reports have been resolved.  The reports delivery will resume on 12/21/2012 @ 1am Central


AzureWatch Daily Reports - Disabled until further notice

20. December 2012 22:53 by author Igor Papirov

Outage:

  • Moderate: We've discovered an issue with data generation for Daily Performance Reports.  The report generation is disabled for all customers until the issue is resolved. Apologies for the inconvenience.

 

 



AzureWatch Monitoring - False outages alerts corrected

19. December 2012 22:49 by author Igor Papirov

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Corrected an error where certain customers would receive false outage notification emails

 



AzureWatch Management Portal - Scale/Rule Action History

6. December 2012 06:37 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Moderate: New screen that shows history of scaling actions and alerts 

Bug Fixes:

  • None

 



AzureWatch Management Portal - Viewing of Diagnostic Tables

3. December 2012 09:58 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Major: New option to view and analyze Trace Logs, Event Viewer, and Infrastructure Logs from AzureWatch Management Studio 

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: User Profile contained a nasty bug that could switch user to an incorrect time zone if the user picked a time zone with characters that needed URL encoding.  Customers are advised to verify that User Profile screen displays correct time zone setting.
  • Minor: ability to define custom metrics with various special characters like %, #, /, etc
  • Minor: Link to Support Forums is switched from the "beta" Uservoice support forums to hosted Q&A support forums

 



AzureWatch Monitoring - Performance Improvements

20. November 2012 08:15 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None 

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Performance improvement: no longer using wad-control-container blob storage to detect changes to monitored deployments in order to force capture of correct metrics - but instead forcing capture of all needed metrics on a schedule


AzureWatch Management Portal - Bug Fixes

20. November 2012 08:11 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None 

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: User Profile screen now saves properly
  • Minor: Rule edit window - fixed the time zone display
  • Minor: Aggregate definition window - enabled minimum 5-minute aggregate for performance-counter based aggregates
  • Minor: Brought back server names from instance tiles on the dashboard screen


AzureWatch Management Portal - Bug Fixes

19. November 2012 08:04 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None 

Bug Fixes:

  • Minor: Spelling errors in error messages
  • Minor: Storage Accounts checking of connection did not properly work on the UI definition screen
  • Minor: Dashboard instance status were not properly refreshing
  • Minor: Allow spaces in custom metric names during entry of aggregate metrics


AzureWatch Monitoring - Performance Improvements

15. November 2012 07:58 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None 

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Some of the larger customers (those who are monitoring 50+ servers) were occasionally experiencing longer than 1-minute monitoring cycles.  Performance improvements have been applied to the monitoring logic


AzureWatch Management Portal - Bug Fixes

11. November 2012 07:39 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • None 

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Dashboard was not rescaling graphs where multipliers where changing during the last hour
  • Minor: Setup Wizard - corrected minor issue with default SQL Azure aggregate metric names
  • Minor: Formatting changes on Payment Transactions screen
  • Minor: Various other minor fixes to UI


AzureWatch Management Portal - Bug Fixes

6. November 2012 07:43 by author Igor Papirov

New Features:

  • Minor: Clicking on VM instance name on the Dashboard screen now shows its Azure diagnostic information 

Bug Fixes:

  • Moderate: Subscription Setup screen not working correctly - fixed
  • Minor: Explorer now shows Roles that are present but not monitored, or that are not present but are configured for monitoring - as crossed out