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.
New Features:
Bug Fixes:
- Minor: Bug preventing adding of new storage accounts to Setup Wizard has been fixed
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
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
New Features:
Bug Fixes:
- Moderate: Bug preventing definition of SQL Azure Federations in certain situations has been fixed
New Features:
Bug Fixes:
- Moderate: All tracked metrics can now be plotted under the Historical Reports again
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
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:
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:
New Features:
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
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
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
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:
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
Outage Resolution:
- Moderate: Data generation issue with Daily Performance Reports have been resolved. The reports delivery will resume on 12/21/2012 @ 1am Central
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.
Bug Fixes:
- Moderate: Corrected an error where certain customers would receive false outage notification emails
New Features:
- Moderate: New screen that shows history of scaling actions and alerts
Bug Fixes:
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
New Features:
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
New Features:
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
New Features:
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
New Features:
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
New Features:
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
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