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.