Does Azure Diagnostics work in the Azure slot?

Question

When collecting Azure diagnostic data, does the test slot also send diagnostic data to the WadPerformanceCounters table?

If so, how can I disable this? Or how can I distinguish production / production when reading diagnostics.

I do not want to display data about our website, assuming that this is all when in fact part of this is an intermediate slot.

Answer 1

Yes - Windows Azure diagnostics are performed in Production and Stage slots. The only real difference between the two slots is the DNS name.

As for enabling diagnostics, there is a good starting point at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg433048.aspx . This provides links to great Windows Azure diagnostic information.

I don’t think there is a way in the diagnostic table data (e.g. WadPerformanceCountersTable) to distinguish between the gaps between Production and Staging. You might be able to filter based on the RowKey value, which I believe contains the deployment identifier, and that will differ between production and stage.

You can also use a different account for production and intermediate slots. This would be a pretty quick .cscfg update that could be done at runtime.

Answer 2

When collecting Azure diagnostic data, an intermediate diagnostic data cell is also sent to the WadPerformanceCounters table?

Yes, they fall into the same table.

Each deployment receives its own unique deployment identifier, which can be found on the control panel for a specific instance (creation or step)

WadPerformanceCountersTable table example

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To find the logs associated with a particular deployment (stage or production), you can filter the table by deployment ID, for example.

 DeploymentId eq '1a2c09bea1234bc1b5e6edb99993ab21' 

If you have too many records for one deployment identifier, you reduce the number of records by adding, say, a time attribute (all records with DeploymentId '1a2c09bea1234bc1b5e6edb99993ab21' were recorded after midnight January 5, 2013), for example

 DeploymentId eq '1a2c09bea1234bc1b5e6edb99993ab21' and Timestamp gt datetime'2013-01-05T00:00:00Z' 

Note that this is not a very optimal way to filter Azure Table Storage (as indicated by Qiwi and Gaurava.

Any query that will not include PartitionKey will result in a full table scan. Since the PartitionKey in WAD tables represents a date / time value, I would recommend using this instead of Timestamp . You can find an efficient way to extract diagnostic data . The post is very helpful.

This will help you find records for each environment (intermediate or production) and specific deployment.