Aug 17, 2011 08:54 GMT  ·  By

System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications has been released to manufacturing and is now available for download from Microsoft.

I first told you about the solution designed to provide monitoring capabilities for Windows Azure applications back in October 2010 when the software giant offered the Release Candidate (RC) of the solution to early adopters for testing.

It has taken the Redmond company almost a year to wrap up System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications, but the RTM bits are now up for grabs.

As noted when the RC went live, the solution is designed to let customers running System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 monitor the availability and performance of their Windows Azure applications.

“The monitoring pack runs on a specified agent and then uses various Windows Azure APIs to remotely discover and collect instrumentation information about a specified Windows Azure application,” the software giant explained.

“The Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications provides no functionality on import. For each Windows Azure application that you want to monitor, you must configure discovery by using the Windows Azure Application monitoring template.”

System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications is a solution offered with customers that have inked a License Mobility through Software Assurance agreement with Microsoft.

This type of license is designed to allow the deployment of apps either on-premises or in the Cloud, according to the Redmond company.

The System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications RTM download is accompanied by a guide set up to help customers get the best out of the tool.

Microsoft notes that “after configuration, the Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications offers the following functionality:

• Discovers Windows Azure applications.

• Provides status of each role instance.

• Collects and monitors performance information.

• Collects and monitors Windows events.

• Collects and monitors the .NET Framework trace messages from each role instance.

• Grooms performance, event, and the .NET Framework trace data from Windows Azure storage account.

• Changes the number of role instances.”

System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications is available for download here.