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

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.

New Features:

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

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

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

New Features:

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

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

New Features:

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

New Features:

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

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

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

Issues Resolved:

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

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

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.

Bugs Fixed:

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

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

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

Bug Fixes:

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

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

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

Bugs resolved:

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

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

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

New Features:

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

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

New Features:

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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:

• 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

New Features:

• N/A

Bug Fixes:

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

New Features:

• N/A

Bug Fixes:

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

New Features:

• N/A

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:

• 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

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

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