Microsoft Windows Azure Gets Cloud Storage Analytics

Developers and administrators leveraging the Microsoft Windows Azure Storage cloud are now privvy to detailed logs and metrics that help track usage and troubleshoot problems in blobs, queues and tables.

According to the Windows Azure team blog entry, it works exactly like it says on the tin: Storage logs are placed in a special container called $logs, where each entry in the blob corresponds to “a request made to the service and contains information like request id, request URL, http status of the request, requestor account name, owner account name, server side latency, E2E latency, source IP address for the request etc.”

The benefits, as noted above, lie largely in debugging. Developers can make sure access requests make it to the network, or see who or what deleted a container, or track the number of anonymous requests, and so on.

Meanwhile, the new Azure storage metrics include the following, as per that blog entry:

Users can also set retention policies, to make sure the logs and metrics are deleted after a certain date for management’s sake. And both logs and metrics are retrievable from any application that can make and receive HTTP/HTTPS requests.

This should make Azure Storage some fans in the cloud ISV world. Keep watching TalkinCloud for more.