How to view / report processor consumption and Windows Azure memory?

Question

What is the easiest way to view and report on percentage statistics of processor and memory usage on all server instances on which the application on Windows Azure is installed?

Do I need to write a worker role that monitors and records CPU and memory usage? Or is there something in Windows Azure that automatically registers this that you can just click on? If something needs to be built, what is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

Sounds like work for Windows Azure Diagnostics. The basic idea is that (a) you enable diagnostics in your role-based code to manage the types of diagnostics that you want to collect, (b) the diagnostic data is collected on your behalf by the agent that runs on each deployed instance, and (c) agents send each data type to a specific location so that the data in all deployed instances is in the same place (which will be in the Azure Blob repository or in the Azure table repository, depending on which is more natural, depending on Character of the data).

General documentation here , as well as features of performance counters (for memory and CPU):. A general “how” to write on the Neil Blog .

There is no need to write a special Worker role for this, and no special code is required (except for a small template code to indicate what you want to connect to).

Answer 2

Yes, there are built-in functions for outputting performance counters to table storage. There are many articles that cover this, but this seems to be the trigger point on MSDN .

A brief overview is that you can set their performance counters in code when your role starts up or if you don't want the diagnostics to run all the time, which you can remotely change settings . Scheduled performance counters are copied to WADPerformanceCountersTable in your azure storage account. From there, you can request it yourself or you can use a commercial tool, for example Cerebrata Diagnostic Manager , which will draw graphs for you, as you are used to seeing on Windows (and much more related to diagnostics in Azure)