New Windows Azure Management Portal : Cloud Service dashboard and Management

Hi on the previous post, we’ve seen that a new version of the Windows Azure Management Portal were released during this day.

Let’s have a look on the Dashboard of a Cloud Service. Here is the dashboard of a custom Cloud Service :

We can distinguish multiple part :

• a ribbon to configure and monitor the cloud service
• a graph for monitoring and information about usage
• some quick glance about the properties (read) of the cloud Service.

The monitor tab focuses on the diagnostic graph and allow you to configure the metrics on you environment (Production and Staging) and on your different instance or with aggregate metrics.

If you clic on the Add Metrics button :  . A new window allow you to choice the metric you’d like to Monitor.

By default, the metrics are the following :

• CPU Percentage
• Data In
• Data Out
• Disk Read Throughput
• Disk WriteThroughput

With the ability to check the metric per instance and/or aggregate metric for all the instance of the Role. But maybe it’s could be interesting to get more metric. If we want more metric we have to enable level monitoring to verbose on the configure tab. So let’s go to the Configure table.

In this part, we can chose :

• the level of monitoring
• the retention of monitoring data

We can also change :

• the connection string
• the settings of the config file (.cscfg) : This party is very interesting because the UI has evolved on this point, we don’t have to look forward the xml file and the settings are parse and can be change.

On the contextual menu (in the bottom), we can :

• Upload a new config file
• Download the config file used by the service
• Configure the Remote Desktop (with the certificate, the username/password and the expiration)
• Save the change (Apply the configuration)
• Discard the change

W’e’ve said that if we change the level of verbose, we could have access to more metrics in the monitoring. So changing for Verbose:

(The warning explain that using verbose could increase the cost of the storage) . Then we save the change and wait for apply.

One it’s successfully changed, we can go back to the monitor Tab.

We can add a new metric and see that a lot of new metric are available :

we have :

• asp.net metrics
• memory available
• process (custom process)
• processor
• Web Service.

all these metrics are the metrics define is my role on start code (OnStart() method).

/*
Example of OnStart() method
*/
double sampleRate = 5.0; 
var diagConfig = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration(); 

var procTimeConfig = new PerformanceCounterConfiguration(); 
procTimeConfig.CounterSpecifier = @"\Processor(*)\% Processor Time"; 
procTimeConfig.SampleRate = System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(sampleRate); 
diagConfig.PerformanceCounters.DataSources.Add(procTimeConfig); 

var diskFreeSpaceConfig = new PerformanceCounterConfiguration(); 
diskFreeSpaceConfig.CounterSpecifier = @"\LogicalDisk(*)\% Free Space"; 
diskFreeSpaceConfig.SampleRate = System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(sampleRate); 
diagConfig.PerformanceCounters.DataSources.Add(diskFreeSpaceConfig); 

var MemoryConfig = new PerformanceCounterConfiguration();
MemoryConfig.CounterSpecifier = @"\Memory\Available MBytes"; 
MemoryConfig.SampleRate = System.TimeSpan.FromSeconds(sampleRate); 
diagConfig.PerformanceCounters.DataSources.Add(MemoryConfig);

/*
…
*/

Then we can select the metrics and show them on the graph :

(So ok, My service doesn’t seem to be call by someone on this period … , will update the post lately with a good screen shot)

to finish this post, let’s go to the last 4 tabs :

• Scale : allow you to select the number of instance for your Cloud service (using a slide bar… don’t worry the change doesn’t not apply on release click, you always have to use the Save button)
• Instance give you information about the number of instance of your cloud service and theirs status. On this screen you can update, swap, delete, reboot, connect in rdp or reimage your instance or service.

• linked resources : allow you to link this cloud service to other cloud service and/or database service to show more metrics and statistics on the Monitoring Graph, scale and configure all the resources in the same time.
• Certificates : allow you to upload or delete certificates used by the cloud service (for Https or RDP).

So I hope this post help you to discover more features of the new Azure Management Portal.

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