SQL Azure Monitoring

The actual setup of SQL Azure monitoring is fairly straightforward.  Upon successful upgrade to the latest version of Control Panel (v2.0 at the time of this post), simply visit the newly available SQL Azure option in your Control Panel explorer.

Add databases to be monitored by right clicking anywhere in the SQL Azure Instances window.

SQL Azure monitoring setup

Fill out connection information for your SQL Azure database

SQL Azure connection information

Upon successfull setup of a SQL Azure database, AzureWatch will automatically instrument the capture of five key metrics: Database size, # of Open connections, # of Blocking Queries, # of Open Transactions and general Response Time.

It is time to aggregate the metrics over some periods of time, so that AzureWatch can properly alert you in case your Rules trigger.

Setting up of aggregations is performed via the next option in explorer: Aggregate Metrics.

SQL Azure rule evaluation

Color ranges will help AzureWatch highlight key metrics on the dashboard

And finally, the setup of alerts can be performed from the Rules screen located underneath Aggregate Metrics

SQL Azure alert

Congratulations! We just instructed AzureWatch to notify us if in the last 5 minutes our SQL Azure database was running any blocking queries.