It has been more than 6 years since I originally launched AzureWatch to help companies monitor and auto-scale their Azure Cloud Services.  Over the years, as the Azure platform grew and matured, my team and I tried to adapt AzureWatch to help provide more value in the ever-changing Azure space. We implemented monitoring for SQL Azure, WebApps, Virtual Machines, and Service Bus. However, as Azure platform and our customers' needs started to rapidly evolve, it became increasingly obvious that AzureWatch's internal architecture and somewhat dated user interface would simply not be able to keep up.

Having learnt many hard lessons and with deeper understanding of what monitoring/automation needs Azure users have, we started to work on a new product called CloudMonix, to replace AzureWatch.  CloudMonix was designed to provide deep insight, /automated issue recovery/ and advanced auto-scaling to Azure (and in the future AWS) platforms.  In early 2015, CloudMonix, was launched with great success.  Since then, we've experienced a sustained 5-10% month-to-month growth rate.

Today, CloudMonix supports monitoring of over 30 different types of cloud resources, integrates with a dozen of third party products, offers beautiful UI and has tons of bells and whistles that are useful for Service Providers, DevOps teams, and Enterprises.  Almost every AzureWatch customer who saw our newsletters and tried CloudMonix, migrated to it and is very happy with the outcome.  The product is that good!  And what's most important, we update and improve CloudMonix on a weekly basis. Literally.

So, I am both saddened and happy to announce that we intend to retire AzureWatch in April of 2017.  We currently have remaining 16 customers that are still using it.  Unfortunately, it is becoming less and less profitable for us to maintain the infrastructure and support of AzureWatch as time progresses

I would like to invite every current and previous AzureWatch user to migrate to CloudMonix and my team and I are ready to every assistance and incentive to help migrate your team to the new platform.

To learn more about CloudMonix and to sign up for a free trial, please visit our website at http://cloudmonix.com

To understand the benefits of CloudMonix and see it in action please schedule a time here: https://paraleap.acuityscheduling.com

If I can assist in any other way, just email igor@paraleap.com

Short FAQ:

Q: What are the benefits of CloudMonix vs AzureWatch?

A: CloudMonix far exceeds both AzureWatch and native Azure monitoring in a number of areas:

• Amount and depth of diagnostic data it can capture, visualize and provide ability to alert on.
• Powerful automation capabilities that can automatically recover your resources from outages and issues. 
• Sophisticated auto-scaling capabilities not only for Cloud Services, but also for resources such as SQL Azure and Data Warehouses, WebApps and Virtual Machines, etc. 
• Native integrations for many 3rd party products like Slack, PageryDuty, Zendesk and Autotask. 
• Amazing UI with ability to scroll your dashboards back in time to easily find root cause of previously occurred production issues. 

    Overall, the full list of benefits is too lengthy to outline in an email.  Happy to discuss the benefits via online meeting. Click here to schedule a discussion: https://paraleap.acuityscheduling.com/

Q: How hard is it to onboard with CloudMonix?

A: Onboarding is incredibly simple.  Setup Wizard takes 4-5 minutes to complete.  CloudMonix comes pre-defined with a number of useful metrics and alerts, so that it brings value right out of the gate.  Configuration Templates offer ability to easily propagate similar monitoring setups across many resources in 2 clicks.

Q: Is there an automatic migration from AzureWatch to CloudMonix?

A: Unfortunately there is not.  However, default monitoring profiles are pre-packaged with a number of useful metrics and alerts.  And everyone who has migrated so far, appreciated the chance to revisit and improve their monitoring setups

Q: What Azure resources can CloudMonix monitor/automate?

A: CloudMonix supports monitoring the following resources (ARM and Classic mode is supported)

• Windows and Linux VMs
• Cloud Services
• Web Apps and Webjobs
• Service Bus Topics and Queues
• SQL Azure and SQL Data Warehouse
• Azure Redis Cache
• DocumentDb Collections
• Azure Storage (Blob, Queue, Table and File storage)
• Stream Analytics and Event Hubs
• Media Services
• Azure Automation Runbooks
• Backup Vaults
• Virtual Networking
• Scheduler
• And more coming (Data Factories, Azure Batch, Scale Sets, Azure Search, Service Fabric, etc.)
• CloudMonix can also monitor various non-Azure resources, such as Oracle, MySql, Sql Server (non-Azure), Windows Servers (non-Azure), Sockets, URLs, and JSON/XML API endpoints

It has been more than 6 years since I originally launched AzureWatch to help companies monitor and auto-scale their Azure Cloud Services.  Over the years, as the Azure platform grew and matured, my team and I tried to adapt AzureWatch to help provide more value in the ever-changing Azure space. We implemented monitoring for SQL Azure, WebApps, Virtual Machines, and Service Bus. However, as Azure platform and our customers' needs started to rapidly evolve, it became increasingly obvious that AzureWatch's internal architecture and somewhat dated user interface would simply not be able to keep up.

Having learnt many hard lessons and with deeper understanding of what monitoring/automation needs Azure users have, we started to work on a new product called CloudMonix, to replace AzureWatch.  CloudMonix was designed to provide deep insight, /automated issue recovery/ and advanced auto-scaling to Azure (and in the future AWS) platforms.  In early 2015, CloudMonix, was launched with great success.  Since then, we've experienced a sustained 5-10% month-to-month growth rate.

Today, CloudMonix supports monitoring of over 30 different types of cloud resources, integrates with a dozen of third party products, offers beautiful UI and has tons of bells and whistles that are useful for Service Providers, DevOps teams, and Enterprises.  Almost every AzureWatch customer who saw our newsletters and tried CloudMonix, migrated to it and is very happy with the outcome.  The product is that good!  And what's most important, we update and improve CloudMonix on a weekly basis. Literally.

So, I am both saddened and happy to announce that we intend to retire AzureWatch in April of 2017.  We currently have remaining 16 customers that are still using it.  Unfortunately, it is becoming less and less profitable for us to maintain the infrastructure and support of AzureWatch as time progresses

I would like to invite every current and previous AzureWatch user to migrate to CloudMonix and my team and I are ready to every assistance and incentive to help migrate your team to the new platform.

To learn more about CloudMonix and to sign up for a free trial, please visit our website at http://cloudmonix.com

To understand the benefits of CloudMonix and see it in action please schedule a time here: https://paraleap.acuityscheduling.com

If I can assist in any other way, just email igor@paraleap.com

Short FAQ:

Q: What are the benefits of CloudMonix vs AzureWatch?

A: CloudMonix far exceeds both AzureWatch and native Azure monitoring in a number of areas:

• Amount and depth of diagnostic data it can capture, visualize and provide ability to alert on.
• Powerful automation capabilities that can automatically recover your resources from outages and issues. 
• Sophisticated auto-scaling capabilities not only for Cloud Services, but also for resources such as SQL Azure and Data Warehouses, WebApps and Virtual Machines, etc. 
• Native integrations for many 3rd party products like Slack, PageryDuty, Zendesk and Autotask. 
• Amazing UI with ability to scroll your dashboards back in time to easily find root cause of previously occurred production issues. 

    Overall, the full list of benefits is too lengthy to outline in an email.  Happy to discuss the benefits via online meeting. Click here to schedule a discussion: https://paraleap.acuityscheduling.com/

Q: How hard is it to onboard with CloudMonix?

A: Onboarding is incredibly simple.  Setup Wizard takes 4-5 minutes to complete.  CloudMonix comes pre-defined with a number of useful metrics and alerts, so that it brings value right out of the gate.  Configuration Templates offer ability to easily propagate similar monitoring setups across many resources in 2 clicks.

Q: Is there an automatic migration from AzureWatch to CloudMonix?

A: Unfortunately there is not.  However, default monitoring profiles are pre-packaged with a number of useful metrics and alerts.  And everyone who has migrated so far, appreciated the chance to revisit and improve their monitoring setups

Q: What Azure resources can CloudMonix monitor/automate?

A: CloudMonix supports monitoring the following resources (ARM and Classic mode is supported)

• Windows and Linux VMs
• Cloud Services
• Web Apps and Webjobs
• Service Bus Topics and Queues
• SQL Azure and SQL Data Warehouse
• Azure Redis Cache
• DocumentDb Collections
• Azure Storage (Blob, Queue, Table and File storage)
• Stream Analytics and Event Hubs
• Media Services
• Azure Automation Runbooks
• Backup Vaults
• Virtual Networking
• Scheduler
• And more coming (Data Factories, Azure Batch, Scale Sets, Azure Search, Service Fabric, etc.)
• CloudMonix can also monitor various non-Azure resources, such as Oracle, MySql, Sql Server (non-Azure), Windows Servers (non-Azure), Sockets, URLs, and JSON/XML API endpoints

We are happy to introduce support for monitoring of Cloud Services deployed with Azure SDK 2.5+ with Azure Diagnostics Extension to AzureWatch and CloudMonix.  Action is required for users who wish to monitor Azure Cloud Services using the Diagnostic Extension with AzureWatch.

In order to properly enable monitoring, kindly specify a valid Azure Storage account for capture of diagnostic data, in the Role configuration screen (see image below).  As with previous Azure Diagnostics Module, spreading diagnostic data from different roles across different Azure storage accounts is recommended.

Please be aware that any change to configuration of performance counters within a specified role, will result in AzureWatch making two calls to UpdateDeployment in order to uninstall and reinstall Azure Diagnostic extension.  While these calls are generally harmless, they may cause a short outage of web traffic if you only have 1 instance deployed within a Webrole.  

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.

A number of important changes are being introduced to AzureWatch this weekend (March 16th):

• Ability to execute rules only after a sustained period of time
  • This feature allows for much better control of the scaling process.  For example, in certain situations it can be far more effective to scale when sustained load is over a certain threshold rather than try to predict what a moving average looks like.  It is important to know that if a rule is configured with a sustained time delay, it will only be executed after continuously being evaluated to TRUE for the specified period of time.
• Ability to send ON and OFF alerts (a single ON email when alert evaluates to TRUE, and a single OFF email when it evaluates to FALSE)
  • This feature reduces spam when a certain rule's condition is continuously TRUE.  It also simplifies configuration since ON/OFF alerts no longer require throttling.  Unless modified, existing Alerts will work as they currently do.
• Separation of Alerts from Management Actions (rules that notify will be separated from rules that execute scale actions, shutdowns, restarts, etc.)
  • This feature is relatively important as it may impact existing rule sets.  Going forward, rules that are Alerts will be evaluated separately from rules that are Management Actions.  When evaluating rules, all Alerts that qualify for execution will be evaluated and acted upon, not just the first one. Management Actions will continue to be evaluated until the first rule that qualifies for execution. Users who currently rely on Alerts to control execution of their Management Actions will want to revisit their scaling configurations.  We do expect percentage of such users to be either very small or non-existent.
  • After the upgrade, we plan to monitor AzureWatch's email queues and switch highly spamming Alerts to have ON/OFF logic.  Impacted customers will be notified.

While we expect minimum impact during or after the upgrade, we want to be transparent with our users: this is probably the most significant change to the Rules engine since the inception of AzureWatch. If you have any concerns, please contact Paraleap support team

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.

This week we are excited to release a long-requested feature in AzureWatch: support for active monitoring of Windows Event Logs.  We are starting things off with support for Application, System and Security logs in Windows Azure Cloud Services (Web or Worker Roles) and Windows Azure Virtual Machines.

Users can now create rule-based alerts that match against entries in a particular Event Log, against a specific event log level, name of the publishing application or text of the entry itself.  We've enhanced our Rules engine to support string comparison and search capabilities.  Even though the extra workload to accommodate monitoring of Event Logs is significant, this feature will be available at no additional charge to users who are already monitoring their servers with AzureWatch.

In order to enable Event Log monitoring, users need to specify which logs should AzureWatch be monitoring and at what level.  Take care to not overwhelm monitoring cycles by asking AzureWatch to inspect too much data per cycle.  Checkboxes and Minimum severity level that users can specify on the Role configuration screen will control how much data is being sent to AzureWatch. Hundreds of log entries per minute should be OK, but once the number of log events gets into thousands per minute, users with a lot of servers may notice slowdowns of their monitoring cycles.

After instructing AzureWatch (and via AzureWatch, Windows Azure itself) as to what Event Log data needs to be transferred to Windows Azure Diagnostics Table Storage or captured through Powershell Remoting, users can create custom alert or management rules based on the Event Log data.  We've enabled a number of Event Log specific variables that can be used in formulas of rules as shown in the screenshot below.  Every event log entry captured during a particular monitoring cycle will be evaluated against user-specific formula until a first matching log entry is found.  Users can combine aggregate metrics together with Event Log based search criteria to create sophisticated rules.  For example, it is possible to create a monitoring rule that looks for .NET errors that occur only when average CPU utilization is over 70%.  In order to support text-search capabilities in our engine, we've added ability to search text-based variables via three new functions: Contains, EndsWith and StartsWith, all of which return TRUE or FALSE when called from the rule's formula

Going forward we intend to further enhance the engine by providing numeric counts of events that match particular criteria to the rules engine, so that users can create rules based not only on individual log entries but also based on quantity of specific events found.

Do you have any feedback as to what you'd like to see from AzureWatch?  Please do not hesitate to contact us!

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

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.

We are pleased to introduce a number of exciting new features to AzureWatch!

Support for multiple Azure subscriptions

Users can now instrument a single AzureWatch account to monitor and auto-scale any number of Azure Subscriptions (previously the limit was one).  Furthermore, users no longer need to transfer all of their diagnostic data into a single storage account.  AzureWatch will automatically detect which storage account a particular Role is transferring its diagnostic data to.  This should simplify account management, billing and configuration steps for AzureWatch users.

Support for alerts based on conditions of individual servers

In addition to receiving alerts based on metrics aggregated across all servers within a compute Role, AzureWatch users can now receive alerts based on conditions of individual servers.  This can help support personnel quickly pin-point problematic servers and take appropriate action.

Support for self-healing!

In addition to generating alerts for individual servers, AzureWatch can now automatically reboot or re-image servers!  This is particularly useful for servers that are leaking memory, disk space, or other resources.

Enhanced support for multiple mailboxes

AzureWatch can now send alerts to multiple mailboxes at an account level.  Furthermore, each individual alert can be further customized to be sent to more mailboxes if needed. This lets AzureWatch users send alerts of different priority levels or areas of responsibility to different contacts.

In Detail

Each rule now has a flag (1) that allows it to inspect metric data server-by-server OR aggregated across all servers within a Role.  If a Rule is inspecting metric data across all servers within a Role (the default scenario) it can auto-scale servers within that Role and send out alerts based on general conditions of all servers within a Role.  However, if users choose to evaluate a particular rule on an individual server basis, it  can reboot or re-image servers instead (2).  This is obviously very useful for conditions related to memory leaks, fragmented or leaking disk space, accumulating "stuck" IIS requests, etc.  While AzureWatch uses Azure Service Management API in order to request rebooting and re-imaging of servers, users should exercise caution and consider putting appropriate thresholds or throttling in place to avoid inappropriate reboots.  

When performing any sort of an action based on Rule (scaling, rebooting, or simply alerting), AzureWatch will send notification to every mailbox specified at the account level.  However, more mailboxes can be configured at an individual Rule level (3).

Remarks

When Azure reboots a server (role instance), it will take it offline, restart the underlying operating system for that server, and brings the role instance back online. Any data that is written to the local disk is persisted across reboots. Any data that is in-memory is lost.

When Azure reimages a server (role instance), it will take it offline and write a fresh installation of the Windows Azure guest operating system to the virtual machine. The instance is then brought back online. Windows Azure attempts to maintain data in any local storage resources when the server is reimaged; however, in case of a transient hardware failure, the local storage resource may be lost.  Any data that is written to a local directory other than that defined by the local storage resource will be lost when the instance is reimaged.

Last week was very exciting for us at Paraleap:

• First, we revamped our website with a crisp and modern look.  If you have a few minutes, please share with us your thoughts on the new design.
• Second, we soft-launched a major new feature to AzureWatch: support for monitoring and auto-scaling of Azure Websites.  Users can now receive alerts or automatically scale the number of instances dedicated to Windows Azure websites.  There are no agents to install and no code to redeploy.  We simply hook into the Azure Service Management API, grab the running totals for standard metrics, extrapolate their rates of change and take this data through our rule-based monitoring and scaling engines.  Users can configure alerts and scale rules using the already familiar interface of AzureWatch Management Portal.

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.

As everyone is probably aware, Windows Azure suffered a world-wide Azure Storage outage on Friday 02/22/2013.  This outage was caused by an expired Microsoft SSL certificate.  The outage impacted Azure Storage, Azure Websites, Service Bus, Media Services, ACS, and Azure Management Portal and lasted for approximately ten hours.

AzureWatch monitors remained active during the outage.  Customers who monitored their storage accounts with "Alert on Failure" option turned on, began receiving alerts at approximately 8:32PM UTC (well in advance of any outage notice on Microsoft's Azure Dashboard).  

It is important to point out that AzureWatch's monitoring was impacted because key metrics located within our customers' Azure deployments were inaccessible.  Furthermore, AzureWatch Management Portal was unavailable because it currently relies on Azure Storage.  To help mitigate our outage, our engineers were available via recently implemented online chat interface to provide extra support to customers logging into our portal.

Overall, this outage yet again underscores the importance of monitoring.  No cloud provider will have a perfect up-time record.  Thus, the faster you know that something is wrong, the faster you can react with a contingency plan.  Even if you do not require all the sophisticated features of AzureWatch, we suggest that you at the minimum use our simple but effective free monitoring utility AzurePing that can send you alerts when it is unable to access your Azure resources.

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 a new AzureWatch feature: daily performance charts delivered via email to our users.  This feature was requested rather frequently in the recent months, and we are happy to oblige.  No action is required to enable this feature.  Every active account (whether trial or paid) will automatically begin receiving daily reports free of charge.

We know that this new capability will provide AzureWatch users with greater insight into the performance of their applications running on top of the Windows Azure platform.

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)

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.

Did you know that Windows Azure billing is done by the clock hour?  This means that if you scaled up an extra instance at 3:30pm and scaled down that instance at 4:30pm, you will incur charges for two hours: for 2-3pm clock hour, and for 3-4pm clock hour.  Thus, it may make sense to scale down only when the clock hour nears its completion.  To take advantage of this, latest version of AzureWatch introduces a new flag to allow for rules to be evaluated only during certain times in a clock hour.  Why scale-down in the beginning or middle of the hour, if the full hour was already paid for?



While Microsoft does not guarantee a specific time span within which instances will actually be deallocated after a scale-down request, Windows Azure is pretty good about deallocating instances only within a few minutes time.  In light of this, it might be prudent to not let the scale-down window to be too near the end of the clock hour, this can help avoid overruns into a new clock hour.

There are a few developments with AzureWatch, an autoscaling and performance monitoring service for Windows Azure applications, that you may be interested in:

• We have a new Q&A support forum, with friendly design inspired by Stackoverflow.com.  I invite you all to participate, not only if you have AzureWatch specific questions, but also if your questions are about Windows Azure in general.  Our goal is to have this forum serve as another place to brainstorm autoscaling, monitoring, or other important Windows Azure-related architectural strategies.
• Work continues on the mobile version of AzureWatch that is geared toward showing statistics and reports on smartphones and tablets running HTML5!
• I will be demonstrating AzureWatch at the Azure Users Group on June 8th, 2011.  Join me!
• Latest version of AzureWatch released into production over this weekend contains a small but handy new dashboard snippet that shows color-coded Ready statuses of all your monitored Azure instances.

We are pleased to announce that v1.1.0 version of AzureWatch has been pushed to production.

In this release we have added support for gathering of custom metrics from web-points provided by you.  This is a fairly important and powerful feature.  In order to be able to monitor even greater variety of metrics, we can now poll web-pages located within your application.  We expect that these web-pages would provide AzureWatch with a simple XML containing metric values.  Certain metrics are just best suited to be polled.  Examples would be: size of SQL Azure database, number of registered users, number of placed orders in the last 24hrs or any other metric that is more associated with your application rather than a particular Azure instance.  As you launch AzureWatch Control Panel tool, you will notice new "External Links" screen that will allow you to enter URL's for these web-pages.  Expected XML format is provided right on the instructions screen (it will also be published on our website).  This feature is currently considered to be in beta.

Another, perhaps minor, but very useful new feature, allows you to throttle scaling events or email notifications at a finer level of detail.  In addition to a global cool-down timer for scaling events, each rule now has its own "delay" timer that would prevent its execution for a period of time.  This is very useful to prevent notification rules from firing too frequently and generating a flood of emails, or to allow Scale-Down rules to have different cool-down timers vs. Scale-Up rules.

We are also working on a version of a mobile application geared toward smartphones and tablets running HTML5!

As a reminder, if you did not get a chance to read our last newsletters:

• We have relaxed our Free Trial conditions.  All previously expired trial accounts that have not used 500 monitored hours are active again!  Login to our website and see if your account is again active! 
• AzureWatch can now monitor your Azure deployments directly from its cloud-based servers.
• Latest version of our configuration tool can be found here.

We continue to innovate at a rapid pace.  Latest (v1.0.56) version of AzureWatch has been released.  Two key new features are:

• Support for custom performance counters.  This feature allows AzureWatch users creation of scaling rules, notifications and alerts based upon highly customizable developer-created performance metrics.  For more information on creation of custom performance counters, visit this helpful blog.
• Copy & Paste functionality for metric and rule setup.  This feature makes it easier for setting up similar metrics and rules across deployments with many roles.

If you did not get a chance to read our last newsletters:

• We have relaxed our Free Trial conditions.  All previously expired trial accounts that have not used 500 monitored hours are active again!  Login to our website and see if your account is again active! 
• AzureWatch can now monitor your Azure deployments directly from its cloud-based servers.
• Latest version of our configuration tool can be found here.

As always, thank you for your continued interest in AzureWatch.  We appreciate you spreading the word about our service and welcome you to contact us with any questions, issues, or suggestions.

Thanks to your feedback, we are relaxing our Free Trial conditions.  We are pleased to announce that all trial accounts are now eligible for 500 free instance-hours or 14 days of unlimited usage - whichever is less restrictive.  Therefore we are activating all previously expired trial accounts that have not exhausted the 500 hour limit.  Login to our website and see if your account is now active!  Latest configuration tool is available for download here.

More news: you are no longer required to host on-premise monitoring agent.  AzureWatch can now monitor your Azure deployments directly from its cloud-based servers.

We have done a significant amount of work on handling certificates.  If you were having issues before with setting up certificates, we encourage you to try again.  For your convenience we have also published a small article on how to setup certificates with AzureWatch here.

Users running server-side beta-client, please update your clients to latest version found at here
And finally, AzureWatch system is backup from tonight's planned downtime.  The outage lasted approximately one hour.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

As always, thank you for your continued interest in AzureWatch.  We appreciate you spreading the word about our service and welcome you to contact us with any questions, issues, or suggestions.

Paraleap Technologies, a Chicago-based emerging provider of cloud computing tools and services, is introducing technology preview of its flagship product, AzureWatch.

AzureWatch works with the Microsoft cloud platform and adds dynamic scaling capabilities to applications running under Windows Azure.  With AzureWatch, IT no longer has to worry about wasting money by over-provisioning resources, or experience slowdowns because Azure servers are overburdened.  This elastic scaling functionality that AzureWatch brings to the table is the key ingredient that brings out the power of Microsoft's cloud platform, allows for significant cost savings and guarantees consistent expectations to users. 

"We're absolutely thrilled to be coming out with AzureWatch on the heels of latest Azure-related announcements at Microsoft's PDC 2010", says Igor Papirov, founder of Paraleap Technologies.  "Windows Azure platform is getting better and more mature every day and our product completes the list of key features by providing automatic provisioning of compute resources to Windows Azure applications"

To learn more about AzureWatch or to participate in the free technology preview, log onto Paraleap Technologies’ web site at http://www.paraleap.com

Paraleap Technologies is proud to announce that it became a partner in Microsoft® BizSpark™ program designed to accelerate the success of emerging startups by providing key resources such as software, support and visibility.

“We are very excited to participate in the BizSpark program,” says Igor Papirov, Founder of Paraleap Technologies. "Thanks to the program we now have better access to cutting edge software and services and can concentrate on building cutting edge products targeting Microsoft Windows Azure platform"


About Paraleap Technologies

Founded in 2010, Paraleap Technologies is an emerging Chicago-based startup, focused on providing tools and services for cloud computing technologies.
AzureWatch is Paraleap’s flagship product, designed to add dynamic scalability and monitoring to applications running in Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform.

Paraleap Technologies, an emerging startup specializing in cloud computing technologies, empowers cloud developers with new tools. The company’s AzureWatch, a service designed to work in Microsoft Azure environments, adds a new dimension to the world of the Microsoft cloud.

Cloud computing is a strategy of making use of compute resources, including applications, infrastructure, and platforms, which are available from third-party providers’ data centers and delivered over a secure Internet connection.  In the early days of cloud computing, the advantage of cost savings was the “low hanging fruit” of the cloud, and businesses embraced it early on to take advantage of that bottom-line benefit. But the advantages go far beyond the cost factor, delivering remarkable ease of use, and access to resources from any location and any computer.

Because the cloud allows users to take advantage of a third-party resource pool, it immediately becomes possible to take advantage of more resources than would otherwise be available in a company’s own in-house data center. AzureWatch helps developers create applications to take full advantage of this potential, with the addition of instant and transparent scalability.

Older systems always required a defined set of resources to be dedicated to a task. The problem with that approach though, was that you never knew for certain whether that task would require more, or fewer resources at any given time. The inevitable result was over-provisioning—which led to wasted and underutilized resources and unnecessary expense. The cloud, as implemented with Microsoft Azure and enhanced with Paraleap Technologies’ AzureWatch, overcomes this wasteful approach by allowing for instant and automatic scalability of resources. If your Azure instances see a demand spike, your capacity will automatically increase—regardless of whether that spike was expected or a complete surprise. By the same token, if you experience a slowdown for any reason, the system will ramp down resource usage.

Applications that vary in usage demand by the month, week, or even by the hour are common. The automatic scaling functionality added by AzureWatch ensures that you always have the capacity you need, at any time.

Visit Paraleap Technologies online at http://www.paraleap.com for more information on AzureWatch.