Short version

AzureWatch is now over four years old and is a little... dated.  In order to keep up with our customers' needs and with innovations in Azure, we recently introduced a brand new monitoring product designed to replace AzureWatch.  The product is called CloudMonix and it is available at http://cloudmonix.com.  CloudMonix enhances Microsoft Azure by providing deep monitoring of most of Azure's infrastructure via live dashboards, ability to self-heal from many different production issues, on-demand historical performance and uptime reports, customizable alerts & notifications, sophisticated auto-scaling engine, integration to third party systems, and a lot more.  CloudMonix is not yet available in Azure Marketplace.

Long version

Five years ago, I set out on a journey to help Azure developers auto-scale their Azure systems.  AzureWatch, a product that I built for that purpose, was originally a Windows desktop application that allowed users to dynamically scale their Web and Worker roles with demand - a feature that Windows Azure lacked back in the day.  

Over the years, AzureWatch was continually enhanced to meet ever-growing customer needs.  As my team grew with the customer base, so did AzureWatch's feature set.  We migrated AzureWatch from a desktop app to a fully hosted cloud solution.  We added monitoring capabilities and live dashboards.  AzureWatch was enhanced to monitor SQL Azure, Storage, Websites and Virtual Machines.  Unfortunately, with each iteration of changes and features, we twisted and adopted AzureWatch to do something it was never meant to.  Ongoing maintenance became hard and time to innovate long.

As market conditions changed and need for auto-scaling decreased, due to basic auto-scaling features being introduced in Azure core platform, it was obvious that we needed to offer customers something more substantial and special.  After looking thru the backlog of customer requests, a few patterns clearly emerged, where we saw that we could add a ton of value

• Very fast onboarding and intuitive UI.  No one has time to learn complex systems that don't work from the get-go
• Deep insight into all levels of technical stack, not just servers. Cloud platforms offer many useful services and they all need to be considered in the overall health of a production system
• Automatic self-healing.  While healing procedures are usually simple to script out (reboot server, restart service, clear cache, recycle app pool, truncate table, etc.), knowing WHEN to execute these procedures can be really challenging.
• Ability to compare & contrast performance, uptime, and other metrics over time.  
• Provide value not just for Azure but other cloud systems for shops that manage or utilize different cloud platforms

Taking into account that AzureWatch's back-end needed to be re-architected to become much more adaptive at monitoring new and different systems and AzureWatch's front-end UI needed a lot of work to become user-friendly, the decision to re-architect the whole product became a no-brainer.  So, in summer of 2014, we set out on a journey to re-invent ourselves and provide a new kind of SaaS service: "Stability-as-a-Service" to cloud production environments with a delightful user experience and backed by our amazing support.

Fast-forward to today.  We delivered and in some ways over-delivered on all of our goals with the release of CloudMonix in March of 2015.  All lessons learnt in the years of maintaining AzureWatch came in handy.  CloudMonix has automatic self-healing and enhanced auto-scaling engines; amazing and responsive UI; ability to integrate with other 3rd party systems; future support for public API, data-region affinity; in-depth monitoring of a number of popular Azure services and ability to develop others very quickly.  There is more, much more.  With a few known exceptions, CloudMonix far exceeds AzureWatch in features and functionality from the get-go and continues to evolve and expand very quickly.

I invite you experience CloudMonix for yourself at http://cloudmonix.com and tell us what you think.

Igor Papirov
CEO
Microsoft Azure Insider
Paraleap Technologies

At the end of 2014, Microsoft released a new Windows Azure SDK v2.5 that has significant impact on monitoring of Azure Cloud Services (web and worker roles) with Azure Diagnostics.  In a nutshell, Azure SDK 2.5 has obsoleted the way Azure Diagnostics was instrumented and collected via their Diagnostics module and switched over to a new Extension-based model utilized for monitoring of Virtual Machines.

From AzureWatch perspective, this means that users who depend on AzureWatch to monitor and auto-scale their Cloud Web and Worker roles should wait before upgrading to Azure SDK v2.5.  AzureWatch is currently not compatible with Azure SDK 2.5 when monitoring Cloud Services.  Monitoring of SQL Azure, Storage, VMs, and other assets is not impacted.  We are working on handling this situation and hope to have more news in the coming weeks ahead.

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.

AzureWatch users can now receive notifications when changes are published to the Windows Azure Service Dashboard.  Upon logging into AzureWatch portal, users can choose to subscribe to any of the Azure Service Dashboard feeds as shown in the screenshot below.  This feature is available free of charge to active AzureWatch users.

Last major AzureWatch release contained support for monitoring and auto-scaling of Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service platform - Virtual Machines.  This was a major release for us and all other feature requests took a back seat while we implemented this functionality.  Now, that Virtual Machine support is behind us, we're happy to start implementing various features that have been requested by our users. This week we are releasing the following three enhancements that our users may find useful: 

• Support for custom scale limits based on time of day.  This feature allows AzureWatch to enforce different scaling ranges based on time of day and without the need to create scaling rules.  This is handy feature for many business applications and b2c websites where usage patterns are known upfront and vary by time.   Scaling rules will still kick-in and work, however the instance limits will adjust based on time
• Ability to import configuration settings from one Role to another.  This is handy for users who have need to configure monitoring for a number of similar Roles.  We often get this request from customers who same Role configurations deployed in different Windows Azure data centers.
• Support for linked accounts.  Customers who have multiple linked AzureWatch accounts can now easily switch between them by simply selecting a different linked account from the AzureWatch menu

Gone are the days when AzureWatch was the only option for auto-scaling of Windows Azure cloud services.  Today, basic auto-scaling support is also offered in Windows Azure itself (free while in beta) and is available as a WASABi Enterprise Library for the do-it-yourself and host-it-yourself types.

This article examines the Pro's and Con's of each approach and explains when using AzureWatch's advanced features makes sense.  A quick reference guide is provided toward the end that documents the differences between three offerings in a side-by-side comparison table.

When it comes to ability to auto-scale, manage, heal and monitor various Windows Azure resources, Enterprise Library WASABi, native Windows Azure monitoring and autoscaling and AzureWatch all offer different features to satisfy different needs.

• WASABi is great for folks who like to have complete control over their scaling implementation, do not mind tinkering with settings on lower level, and do not really need monitoring of such Azure services as SQL Azure or Storage.  WASABi allows users to deploy their own scaling engines, provide sophisticated XML-based configuration sets and basically tinker with things in depth.  Users running WASABi are also responsible for hosting and monitoring it.
• Windows Azure's native support for auto-scaling was recently added into the platform itself.  This is a great option for users who prefer simplicity over flexibility and probably targets smaller or non-mission critical applications.  It is also great for users who are just starting out with Windows Azure and are not yet sure what features from an auto-scaling platform they need.
• AzureWatch's strengths lie somewhere in the middle of the other two options.  It offers endless abilities to tinker with settings of its auto-scaling engine, albeit not at the same level of depth as WASABi, but at the same time it provides a nice configuration UI and a fully managed environment.   Furthermore, it supports monitoring of SQL Azure, Storage, and has a ton of other features that make it compelling for businesses running serious applications on the Azure platform.
  On top of supporting all of the customary auto-scaling options like upper/lower boundaries, throttling, etc. AzureWatch also allows scheduled-based scaling, ability to restart/re-image misbehaving VMs, scheduled-based shutdown-startup of servers, ability to scale based on rate of change in demand, ability to evaluate complex boolean rules, and tons of other features that its users have requested over the years to support their sophisticated monitoring and scaling strategies.
  AzureWatch is a commercial product not owned by Microsoft and while not expensive, it is not free and may not be the best choice for users who are just playing around with Windows Azure platform or who run small personal websites.

Arlington Heights, IL

As a featured add-on in the Windows Azure Store, AzureWatch provides on-demand elasticity, healing, monitoring and just-in-time provisioning of resources – saving time and money

Paraleap Technologies, a developer of high performance tools and services for cloud computing technology, today announced that their flagship product, AzureWatch, is now offered as an add-on option in the Windows Azure Store, part of the Windows Azure management portal. Developers and IT professionals can now easily implement AzureWatch’s dynamic scalability, healing and monitoring to their applications running on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform.

As one of the first autoscaling and monitoring services available, AzureWatch has proven itself to be a responsive and affordable service continuously improving and expanding its features. Earlier this year AzureWatch released its newest version which simplified the configuration process and in April expanded services again to offer healing-as-a-service (HaaS) for Windows Azure. HaaS now allows AzureWatch to automatically reboot or re-image servers saving clients time and money on servers that leak memory, disk space or other resources.

As an add-on available through the Windows Azure Store, IT pros can now quickly deploy AzureWatch from inside the Windows Azure management portal. The availability of AzureWatch through the Windows Azure Store helps deliver fast and cost-saving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and HaaS-based monitoring and autoscaling of applications running in Windows Azure. Designed with a focus on simplicity and ease of use, AzureWatch can be quickly configured to address each customer’s unique monitoring needs. By automatically scaling Windows Azure services to match real-time demand, AzureWatch saves customers time and money and eliminates the need for manual monitoring of Windows Azure-based resources.

“The Windows Azure Store is an integral part of the developer experience and makes it easy for developers to find and purchase add-ons to help create great applications,” says Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, Windows Azure, Microsoft. “We are pleased to welcome Paraleap to the Windows Azure Store and look forward to giving developers access to Paraleap’s monitoring and autoscaling technologies for their applications.”

“The future of information technology rests in the cloud; Microsoft has long been a global leader in providing a secure open cloud platform. With more and more companies moving services and solutions to the cloud, it is crucial that they have access to the comprehensive monitoring services that AzureWatch provides. Offering AzureWatch through the Windows Azure Store enables us to educate developers and IT pros on the important work we do and extend our services as developers build, deploy and maintain their applications.” says Igor Papirov, founder and CEO of Paraleap Technologies.

“We have been using AzureWatch for close to a year to monitor our Windows Azure app. It is an essential part of our tool belt,” says Hector Obregon, CEO of Formiik.com. “The daily performance reports and metrics history have helped us solve many problems and the e-mail notifications work great, we have those feed directly into our support desk.”

Pricing and Availability 

AzureWatch pricing is simple, affordable and based solely upon what is monitored. AzureWatch is offered in five packages to Windows Azure customers: 

• Free Package: monitors up to 500 unit-hours per month - free 
• Basic Package: monitors up to 5 units per month - $39.90 per month 
• Plus Package: monitors up to 10 units per month - $74.90 per month 
• Super Package: monitors up to 25 units per month - $159.90 per month 
• Ultra Package: monitors up to 100 units per month - $549.90 per month

About Paraleap Technologies 

Paraleap Technologies is a Chicago-based software company focused on providing tools and services for cloud computing technologies. As the Paraleap’s flagship product, AzureWatch is designed to add dynamic scalability and monitoring to applications running on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform.

Paraleap Technologies are proud to sponsor this year's Windows Azure Global Bootcamp.  It is exciting to see a community-based event of such large proportions organized around Windows Azure.  Our commitment to provide a free unlimited 1-month license to every participant has not wavered even as the size of potential giveaways grew from hundreds to nearly 10,000!  We are hopeful to welcome many new happy users to our every-growing user community.

As we get ready for the rush of signups, we would like to encourage new users to read the following instructions carefully in order to make their on-boarding as smooth as possible.  Our support personnel will be working non-stop throughout this time to make sure everyone's signup and monitoring experience is impeccable but it is unlikely that we would be able to reply to every question in minutes or hours, like we usually do.

• In order to receive your free subscription, you will need a promo code from Bootcamp's organizers.  Please contact event organizers if you have not received your code.  We will not be able to provide any additional promo codes at this time.
• Please read setup instructions to ensure your configuration stage goes smoothly
• Please note that every screen within AzureWatch Management Portal contains an "i" button in the top right corner that provides context-sensitive help and detailed instructions
• Please note that AzureWatch Management Portal explorer contains a Help branch with detailed instructions on various subjects of monitoring and auto-scaling 
• Unless your question contains sensitive information, please post it on our support forums - we monitor those forums as closely as we monitor our support ticket queue, however, every answer on those forums can help hundreds of other users who may have a similar question.
• If you have checked out AzureWatch and no longer need its monitoring capabilities we ask you to kindly Stop Monitoring and help us conserve our compute resources

Some frequently asked questions:

• While we are firmly committed to supporting the full spectrum of Windows Azure platform, at this time AzureWatch does *not* yet support monitoring of Azure Virtual Machines (IAAS), Media Services, and HDInsight (Hadoop).  We *do* support Windows Azure Cloud Services (Web/Worker Roles), Azure Websites, SQL Azure, Federations, Storage, and portions of Service Bus 
• If you would like to monitor multiple Azure subscriptions, you will need to open multiple AzureWatch accounts.  This will change soon, but as of right now, we limit one account to one subscription

Expanding on its popular line of monitoring products, Paraleap Technologies today announced public availability of the newest edition of AzureWatch, a monitoring and autoscaling service for applications running on top of Microsoft’s Windows Azure. The newest version introduces AzureWatch Management Portal that simplifies the configuration process allowing companies to quickly establish monitoring and autoscaling rules that save time and money. Updates in this version include:

• Revamped online interface that no longer needs desktop installation or agent software 
• Support for monitoring of SQL Azure, SQL Federations, Service Bus, and Azure Storage 
• Support for monitoring of websites and SSL certificates 
• Live performance dashboards 
• Streamlined configuration setup featuring revamped Setup Wizard

Since 2010 AzureWatch has provided monitoring and autoscaling solutions to hundreds of companies that rely on the Windows Azure platform. “With more and more companies moving services and solutions to the cloud, it is crucial that they have access to comprehensive monitoring services,” said Igor Papirov, founder and CEO of Paraleap Technologies. “Any minute when the health of your applications is compromised can impact not only your company’s bottom line but its reputation as well.”

“We have been using AzureWatch for close to a year to monitor our Azure app. It is an essential part of our tool belt,” says Hector Obregon, CEO of Formiik.com. “The daily performance reports and metrics history have helped us solve many problems and the e-mail notifications work great, we have those feed directly into our support desk.” Designed with a focus on simplicity and ease of use, AzureWatch can be quickly configured to address each customer’s unique monitoring needs. By automatically scaling Azure services to match real-time demand, AzureWatch saves customer’s time and money and eliminates the need for manual monitoring of Azure based resources. More information and a free preview are available at http://www.paraleap.com

About Paraleap Technologies 
Paraleap Technologies is a Chicago-based software company focused on providing tools and services for cloud computing technologies. As the Paraleap’s flagship product, AzureWatch is designed to add dynamic scalability and monitoring to applications running on Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform.

Things have been very busy at Paraleap Technologies.  Since the start of summer, we have been working on creating a new version of the AzureWatch configuration and monitoring interface.  The result of this effort is a great-looking AzureWatch management portal, preview of which I am proud to invite you to try.  In the forthcoming months, we will be decommissioning our legacy Windows-based Control Panel application and migrating all of our customers onto our new AzureWatch management portal.

• No more installation issues related to Windows 8 incompatibilities, firewalls, or anti-virus warnings
• No more login issues related to inaccurate time-clock on local Windows computers
• No more intermittent resolution-related issues that caused our UI to look misaligned
• No more account lockouts due to password-reset related issues
• Full accessibility of AzureWatch monitoring tools on non-Windows machines and tablets

We are excited to introduce support for active monitoring of SQL Azure Federations!  Federations is one of the newer members to SQL Azure family.  Capable of mega-scale and unlimited size, SQL Azure Federations allow customers to distribute their data and processing power across multiple federated members (shards). While each federated member is a unique database, connecting to and keeping an active monitoring eye on all of these databases is challenging.  By using AzureWatch, database administrators can now actively monitor all federated members and be immediately notified when any one of them is getting too large, too slow, or needs other special attention.  

Experienced AzureWatch users and newcomers alike will find the setup of SQL Azure Federations to be relatively simple.  A new option on the navigation explorer enables entry of federations that need to be monitored.  

Enter the required credentials and make sure that your desktop PC has firewall access to your SQL Azure federated databases, so that the locally running AzureWatch Control Panel can connect and verify the information

Once the monitoring is running, AzureWatch will query the root database and all federated members once per minute in order to store, aggregate and evaluate vital statistics.  At the time of this writing AzureWatch will gather the following:

• Database Size
• Number of open transactions
• Number of open connections
• Number of blocking queries
• Number of federated members (root database only)

In order to send out alerts when important events happen, AzureWatch will need to know how information needs to be aggregated, for how long and what are the rules that govern the generation of each alert. Users will want to decide if metrics need to be aggregated across all federated members together or by individual federated member.  For example, it may be important to know when any one of federated members has exceeded a certain size as this may be an indicator to consider a SPLIT of that federated member.  Alternatively, users may want to know when the total number of blocking queries against all federated members exceeds a certain threshold as this may indicate a problem with the application itself and would require further investigation.

This article will walk through the configuration of an alert that would trigger when any one of the federated members has exceeded 10GB in size.

Alerts generated by AzureWatch will trigger when Rules evaluate to TRUE.  Each Rule consists of a custom boolean formula that compares aggregate metrics.  For the example at hand, an aggregate metric defined by Federation Member must be setup to aggregate the Database Size raw metric.  To do so, create a new aggregate under the By Federation Member\Aggregate Metrics section as shown in the example below.

Final step, the configuration of the actual Rule that would send out an alert

The alert Rule is represented by a formula that uses aggregate metrics as variables and sends out an Email notification when its formula evaluates to TRUE.  In order to prevent a barrage of emails, setting a threshold for how frequently such emails would be sent might be prudent.  (In our example no more than once per 20 minutes)

In the last few weeks, we released a colossal amount of new features to AzureWatch! Active monitoring of Websites, Azure Storage accounts, and SQL Azure databases just to name a few. We've also drastically improved capabilities of our Rules engine to allow for more complex rules.  In addition, we improved our Android and Mobile applications to allow for more streamlined access at seeing Azure application's health from smartphones.

For over a year now, AzureWatch has been helping customers with monitoring and auto-scaling of their systems in Windows Azure.  We're very excited about the new capabilities of our service and are looking forward to working on our next major featureset: implementation of monitoring of SQL Azure Federations.

Version 2.0.2 of AzureWatch introduces new capability to the product: monitoring and alerts of key performance and connectivity characteristics for Azure Storage accounts.

Once a minute, AzureWatch will connect to queue, blob and table storage endpoints of monitored Azure Storage accounts, and attempt to create and then purge a test queue message, a test blob, and a test table eneity object.  AzureWatch will capture key performance indicators as well as any storage errors that occur so that you can be notified immediately of any problems.

Setup instructions:

Find Azure Storage section in the Control Panel explorer

Add new Storage Account by right-clicking in the Azure Storage listing area

These simple steps will make sure that AzureWatch emails you if it was unable to perform all of its monitoring actions within the Timeout specified.  In addition, if you'd like to know when Azure Storage is simply slowing down, create an aggregate and a rule around the ResponseTime_msec metric:

To create an aggregate, simply visit Aggregate Metrics screen under Azure Storage section of Explorer:

And finally, get notified by a Rule when this aggregate is outside a safety threshold:

We are happy to announce that AzureWatch now supports SQL Azure monitoring!  Please view the release notes below for detailed information on new features rolled out in AzureWatch v2.0.  

• Ability to monitor SQL Azure databases (extra charges may apply)
  • Get notified on connection failures
  • Monitor blocking queries
  • Monitor response times
  • Monitor database size
  • Monitor open connections
  • Monitor open transactions
• Enhancements to the Rules engine include
  • Access current date & time during rule evaluation.  This can help with scheduling of events
  • Interrogate quantity of raw metrics aggregated during the rule evaluation.  This can help with sophisticated running-averages
• Metric Reports have been enhanced
  • Metric data and charts are now shown in local time zone rather than UTC
  • Reports can be quickly viewed by using a predefined range dropdown
  • Charts have been redesigned to show more data
• A number of smaller bugs fixed throughout the AzureWatch Android app, our reporting mobile site and the Control Panel configuration utility

SQL Azure Monitoring

The actual setup of SQL Azure monitoring is fairly straightforward.  Upon successful upgrade to the latest version of Control Panel (v2.0 at the time of this post), simply visit the newly available SQL Azure option in your Control Panel explorer.

 

Add databases to be monitored by right clicking anywhere in the SQL Azure Instances window.

 

 

Fill out connection information for your SQL Azure database

 

 

Upon successfull setup of a SQL Azure database, AzureWatch will automatically instrument the capture of five key metrics: Database size, # of Open connections, # of Blocking Queries, # of Open Transactions and general Response Time.

 

It is time to aggregate the metrics over some periods of time, so that AzureWatch can properly alert you in case your Rules trigger.

 

Setting up of aggregations is performed via the next option in explorer: Aggregate Metrics.

 

 

Color ranges will help AzureWatch highlight key metrics on the dashboard

 

And finally, the setup of alerts can be performed from the Rules screen located underneath Aggregate Metrics

 

 

Congratulations! We just instructed AzureWatch to notify us if in the last 5 minutes our SQL Azure database was running any blocking queries.

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!