Monitor and troubleshoot a cloud storage application

This tutorial is part four and the final part of a series. You learn how to monitor and troubleshoot a cloud storage application.

In part four of the series, you learn how to:

Azure storage analytics provides logging and metric data for a storage account. This data provides insights into the health of your storage account. Before you can be visibility into your storage account, you need to set up data collection. This process involves turning on logging, configuring metrics, and enabling alerts.

Logging and metrics from storage accounts are enabled from the Diagnostics tab in the Azure portal. There are two types of metrics. Aggregate metrics collect ingress/egress, availability, latency, and success percentages. These metrics are aggregated for the blob, queue, table, and file services. Per API collects the same set of metrics for each storage operation in the Azure Storage service API. Storage logging enables you to record details for both successful and failed requests in your storage account. These logs enable you to see details of read, write, and delete operations against your Azure tables, queues, and blobs. They also enable you to see the reasons for failed requests such as timeouts, throttling, and authorization errors.

Log in to the Azure portal

Log in to the Azure portal

Turn on logging and metrics

From the left menu, select Resource Groups, select myResourceGroup, and then select your storage account in the resource list.

Under Diagnostics set Status to On. Ensure Blob aggregate metrics, Blob per API metrics, and Blob logs are enabled.

When complete, click Save

Enable alerts

Alerts provide a way to email administrators or trigger a webhook based on a metric breaching a threshold. In this example, you enable an alert for the SASClientOtherError metric.

Navigate to the storage account in the Azure portal

From the left menu, select Resource Groups, select myResourceGroup, and then select your storage account in the resource list.

Under the Monitoring section, select Alert rules.

Select + Add alert, under Add an alert rule, fill in the required information. Choose SASClientOtherError from the Metric drop-down.

Simulate an error

To simulate a valid alert, you can attempt to request a non-existent blob from your storage account. To do this, replace the <incorrect-blob-name> value with a value that does not exist. Run the following code sample a few times to simulate failed blob requests.

sasToken=$(az storage blob generate-sas \
    --account-name <storage-account-name> \
    --account-key <storage-account-key> \
    --container-name <container> \
    --name <incorrect-blob-name> \
    --permissions r \
    --expiry `date --date="next day" +%Y-%m-%d` \
    --output tsv)

curl https://<storage-account-name>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<incorrect-blob-name>?$sasToken

The following image is an example alert that is based off the simulated failure ran with the preceding example.

Download and view logs

Storage logs store data in a set of blobs in a blob container named $logs in your storage account. This container does not show up if you list all the blob containers in your account but you can see its contents if you access it directly.

In this scenario, you use Microsoft Message Analyzer to interact with your Azure storage account.

Download Microsoft Message Analyzer

Download Microsoft Message Analyzer and install the application.

Launch the application and choose File > Open > From Other File Sources.

In the File Selector dialog, select + Add Azure Connection. Enter in your storage account name and account key and click OK.

Once you are connected, expand the containers in the storage tree view to view the log blobs. Select the latest log and click OK.

On the New Session dialog, click Start to view your log.

Once the log opens, you can view the storage events. As you can see from the following image, there was an SASClientOtherError triggered on the storage account. For additional information on storage logging, visit Storage Analytics.

Storage Explorer is another tool that can be used to interact with your storage accounts, including the $logs container and the logs that are contained in it.

Next steps

In part four and the final part of the series, you learned how to monitor and troubleshoot your storage account, such as how to:

Follow this link to see pre-built storage samples.