New Analytics Data Provides Insight into Windows Azure Storage

Customers leveraging Microsoft’s Cloud platform are now able to take advantage of Logs and Metrics, namely Analytics data designed to provide insight into Windows Azure usage Storage.

According to Microsoft, the new enhancements introduced will simplify a variety of tasks, including tracking, analyzing, and debugging associated with Windows Azure Storage usage (Blobs, Tables and Queues).

The software giant recommends that developers take advantage of the new analytics data in order to better the design of their Cloud applications and also improve access patterns to Windows Azure Storage.

The Logs “feature provides a trace of all executed requests for your storage accounts as block blobs in a special container called $logs. Each log 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. This data now empowers you to analyze your requests much more closely,” Microsoft explained.

Windows Azure Storage Analytics Logs is not limited to Blobs, but also covers Tables and Queues, the software giant stressed.

In addition, Windows Azure customers can turn to Metrics for Blobs, Tables and Queues statistics in relation to a specific storage account.

Microsoft revealed that there are two types of Windows Azure Storage Analytics Metrics statistics:

“Request information: Provides hourly aggregates of number of requests, average server side latency, average E2E latency, average bandwidth, total successful requests and total number of failures and more.

“Capacity information: Provides daily statistics for the space consumed by the service, number of containers and number of objects that are stored in the service.”

Windows Azure customers will be able to access Analytics Logs and Metrics data directly via their accounts, the Redmond company said. According to Microsoft, they need only take advantage of the Blob and Table REST APIs.