1. Once a minute we will attempt to connect to your SQL Azure instance. This is a regular ADO.NET connection. The timeout for this connection is by default 5 seconds, and you can change it during definition of a SQL Azure instance. If we are unable to connect to your SQL Azure database within specified time, we email alert with the text of the exception text to you. You can disable these alerts on the same SQL Azure connection definition screen.
2. If connection to your SQL Azure instance was successful, we run a number of queries against your SQL Azure instance to determine various SQL-Azure related metrics: database size, open transactions, blocking queries, etc. Each query is run separately with its own timeout (default of 5 seconds). If any errors occur during execution of those queries, we’ll email you the exception text.
Reasons why you may be getting alerts while your application seems to be OK:
1. We connect from North-Central Azure data center. If your database is located in a different datacenter, there may be internet-related latency that’s causing connection opening to last longer than 5 seconds.
2. Your apps may seem to be OK if they have a longer timeout value (typically 60 seconds). While our default of 5 seconds may timeout quicker.
3. Not being able to connect within the timeout of 5 seconds is not reflective of the database being down, but of a simply slower-performing database or of heavy network traffic between client and server. You can increase the default timeout from 5 seconds to a larger number and track response times via Rules.
