We are extremely excited to publish our very first newsletter.  It has been a month since the release of AzureWatch into public beta and the response has been overwhelmingly positive and constructive. Although the first day was somewhat rough since we managed to make a typo in the download URL(!), the month overall has been very productive and exciting. 

Since the initial announcement on November 1st, AzureWatch monitored over 3,000 compute instance hours and captured and analyzed over a million of performance metrics!  Furthermore, we have deployed over ten patches and one major release with brand new functionality which I would like to inform you about.

As of Friday, November 26th, AzureWatch was updated to support two important new features:

• Historical reports.  Access to historical graphs and reports of your performance counters and other metrics.  With this feature, you are able to see historical values of your metrics for up to a month visually on a chart or in a table format.  You can drill down to actual raw values or simply look at the hourly or daily averages - all with just a few clicks of a button.  You can export or print the data too!
• Tracking of instance statuses.  In addition to performance counters and queue lengths, AzureWatch now tracks instance counts by status.  It can differentiate between "Ready", "Busy", "Unresponsive", and other Azure Instance statuses.  You can now create rules using those metrics.  Want to get notified if any of your instances have become Unresponsive?  No problem, make a simple rule for that.  Want to scale UP if the number of Ready instances is below a certain threshold?  No problem, make a rule for that too.

We remain on target with releasing AzureWatch in production early in 2011.  We would like to thank you for your continued support and ask you to keep those bug reports and feature requests coming!