System downtimes can be more than just embarrassing . They can have negative impact on your revenue, customers, and reputation!  By using AzureWatch you can get notified in real-time in the event your Azure nodes become Unresponsive.  You can even configure AzureWatch to scale your application up when this happens!

Setting AzureWatch to monitor your node counts is fairly simple and straightforward.  AzureWatch already tracks how many nodes are Ready, Busy, Unresponsive, etc.  Simply setup an Aggregate Metric that calculates an average or last value of Unresponsive count for the last, say 5 minutes.  Then create a Rule that scales your Role UP when the newly created aggregated metric drops below a certain value.  It might be also good idea to place a safety check into the rule, to make sure that the system does not keep scaling up indefinitely .