Diagnosing and troubleshooting issues in modern online applications is more complex than in traditional client-server applications because they include:
- Complex topologies with components running PaaS or IaaS infrastructure, on-premises, on mobile devices, or some combination of these
- Network traffic that traverses public and private networks; including devices with unpredictable connectivity
- Multiple storage technologies such as Microsoft Azure Storage Tables, Blobs, Queues, or Files in addition to other data stores such as relational databases.
The Azure Storage service includes sophisticated capabilities to help you to manage these challenges. These capabilities include enabling you to monitor the Storage services your application uses for any unexpected changes in behavior (such as slower than usual response times) as well as extensive logging capabilities – both in the storage service and client applications developed with the storage client libraries. The information you obtain from both monitoring and logging will help you to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue and determine the appropriate steps you can take to remediate it. The Storage Services monitoring and logging capabilities were designed not to affect the performance of your operations, plus also includes the ability to define retention policies for managing the amount of storage consumed.
To help you learn how to manage the health of your online services we have developed the Storage Monitoring, Diagnosing and Troubleshooting Guide. This includes prescriptive guidance on monitoring and diagnosing problems related to health, availability, performance and capacity – as well as actionable troubleshooting guidance for the top issues that ourselves and our support teams face when working with customers. For anyone building Storage based applications we believe this guide is essential reading! The illustration below shows extracts from each of the sections focused on how to manage the performance of your application.
