For those of you who missed our beta release announcement, AzureServiceMon is a new service from the company that brought you Office365Mon. We have just released a significant new addition to the service this week, which we call Azure Metric Monitoring.
When AzureServiceMon released beta 1, we provided availability monitoring and notifications for a number of your Azure resource types. It’s all wrapped up in a simple to use interface that regularly inventories your collection of Azure resources so as you change what you’re using, you don’t need to try and keep your monitoring in sync. One of the first pieces of feedback we got from the beta 1 release was that customers wanted more. Specifically, not only do they want to know when their services are down, but they wanted a way to “peek inside” to see how their various resources are doing before they go down. That’s how Azure Metric Monitoring came to be.
Using Azure Metric Monitoring is just as simple as setting up availability monitoring for it. To begin with, you go to our site at https://azureservicemon.com and configure availability monitoring. Spoiler alert – that involves about 2 minutes to fill in a couple of fields and check some boxes – incredibly easy. After you’ve done that, you can go to our Configure Metric Monitoring page at https://azureservicemon.com/Configure/Metrics. You’ll see another very easy to use interface that looks like this:
What’s great about this approach is that it takes the same very simple and very easy approach we use for availability monitoring. You don’t need to go to the Azure portal and try and create a bunch of policies on each of the different resources you have. Instead, you can come in here and in one place – set the thresholds you want to use for notifications for *all* your resources at once. Just click on the resource type bar – i.e. SQL Database Metrics, Virtual Machines Metrics, etc. – to set the thresholds for those resource types. Click the Update button and you’re done.
After that, we do all the heavy lifting for you. Want to know when the CPU utilization on your SQL Server databases rises above 75%? Want to know when the average response time of the pages on your web sites is more than 10 seconds? How about what kind of network bandwidth you’ve been chewing up with your virtual machines? Or how many queries have been throttled by Search services? The list of possibilities goes on and on here. When any of these thresholds on any of your resources are exceeded, you quickly get notifications about it. Just like all our other notifications, you can get emails, text messages, and/or use our webhook feature so you can plug in your own workflow, on premise notification systems, on premise issue tracking systems, etc.
In addition to that, there are also reports (and more coming) that you can use to get details on what the metric statistics are for all of the resources that we’re watching for you. For example, here’s a set of metrics on all of our Azure web sites:
You can see the most recent 24 hours’ worth of metrics here, but we’ll also have reports that show you what the hourly averages, sums and counts are like over the last week, as well as monthly summaries.
Azure Metric Monitoring is available today as part of our beta 1 service release of AzureServiceMon. It’s free to use while we’re in the beta release, and when you participate you will find other options to extend your free usage once we deliver our RTM release. Check out the Beta 1 Readme for more details on that, as well as to learn about all of the other interesting aspects of this first release.
Azure Metric Monitoring was added based on feedback from our customers using the initial release of AzureServiceMon. Try it out and let us know what you think, and maybe we can get your feature requests added to the service too!
Thanks from Sunny Phoenix,
Steve
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