Introduction

• AzureWatch can actively monitor and auto-scale your servers running under the Windows Azure Cloud Services platform (these would be Web Roles and Worker Roles Azure's within PaaS offering) and Azure Websites.  
• AzureWatch can actively monitor your SQL Azure, SQL Azure Federations, and Azure Storage accounts
• AzureWatch can actively monitor any public URL's that you own
• AzureWatch currently does not yet support native monitoring of VM/IaaS servers
• More detailed information about AzureWatch features can be found here
• Basic setup of AzureWatch monitoring & auto-scaling can take less than 2-3 minutes once prerequisites have been satisfied.  Obviously, users can and should customize the monitoring/scaling experience to their particular needs, afterwards.
• AzureWatch, being a cloud-based monitoring platform, runs 24/7/365 within our cloud environment and monitors your Azure-based resources by connecting to them approximately every minute.  When conditions reach your pre-configured thresholds, AzureWatch sends out email alerts or issues scale up or down requests.

Pre-Requisites

• You need to sign up for a free trial AzureWatch account here.  (Trial lasts for either 14 days or 500 monitored hours - whichever lasts longer)
• If you want to monitor and auto-scale Azure Cloud Services (Web/Worker Roles) - there are a few important steps that need to be done upfront.
  • All of the Web and Worker Roles, that need to be monitored, must be deployed through a single Azure Storage account
  • All of the Web and Worker Roles, that need to be monitored, must have Azure Diagnostics enabled prior to deployment
  • Simplest way of accomplishing both steps is to configure all Roles that need to be monitored or auto-scaled by checking "Enable Diagnostics" and "Use publish storage account as connection string when you publish to Windows Azure" settings in Visual Studio's properties for each Role within the .ccproj (Cloud) project.  Redeployment into an empty Staging or Production slot is necessary afterwards.
  • In case of issues kindly contact support.  We've helped literally hundreds of customers successfully enable diagnostics and have experience working through various scenarios
  • Sample picture of what Role properties in Visual Studio look like is attached below

Initial Setup

• Step 1 - let the wizard know what types of Azure-based resources you want to configure.  Also, what email address to use for sending out of actual alerts

• Step 2 - Specify Azure settings needed to monitor Cloud Services (Web and Worker Roles).

• Step 2a - Navigate to either of Microsoft's Windows Azure Management portals and grab the SubscriptionId of your Azure Subscription
  • Old Azure Portal

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  • or New Azure Portal

• Step 2b - In order to auto-scale and effectively monitor your Web and Worker Roles, AzureWatch needs to communicate with Service Management API via a trusted management certificate.  Management certificate, unique to your AzureWatch account, has been generated when you signed up for an account.  Public key of this certificate needs to be uploaded to either of the Azure portals' Management Certificates area.  
  • Old Azure Portal

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  • New Azure Portal

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  • After specifying SubscriptionId and uploading AzureWatch's public key .CER file to Azure management certificates area, press "Connect" and provide AzureWatch with the name of the Azure Storage Account that was used to deploy your applications through and capture diagnostic information into (this was the same Azure Storage account discussed in the prerequisites section)
  • Hardest part is now over...

• Step 3 - Uncheck any Roles that you do not want monitored.  Provide minimum and maximum boundaries to scaling actions

• Step 4 - Enable/Disable any default monitoring and auto-scaling rules that AzureWatch wizard will offer to instrument
  • You do not need to enable the performance counters prior to deployment.  AzureWatch will use Service Management API to always make sure that your servers are capturing needed performance counters
  • You can change/delete/add rules after the Setup Wizard completes at will
  • Setup Wizard will create appropriate Aggregated metrics and Rules across all the servers in your Roles (selected on the previous wizard screen)

• Step 5 - Setup of monitoring for SQL Azure databases.  
  • AzureWatch cannot detect what SQL Azure databases you have running.  You will need to manually provide connection settings for any SQL Azure databases you want monitored.  
  • Do not add ".database.windows.net" when specifying name of the SQL Azure servers
  • Do not add "@servername" when specifying username 
  • Specified account needs to have sufficient privileges to execute Dynamic Management Views 

• Step 6 - Enable/Disable which default SQL Azure monitoring rules you'd like for Wizard to create for any selected SQL Azure databases.
  • Remember, you can always change/add/delete these monitoring rules later

• Steps 7/8 - Setup Azure Storage and URL monitoring in a similar fashion

Wizard Complete