Monitoring Azure Storage Blobs

This document provides information on how to monitor your Azure Storage blobs, including using Azure Monitor, diagnostic logs, and metrics.

Why Monitor Blob Storage?

Monitoring is crucial for understanding the performance, availability, and usage patterns of your blob storage accounts. It helps in:

Azure Monitor for Blob Storage

Azure Monitor is the primary service for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your Azure and on-premises environments. For Blob Storage, Azure Monitor provides:

Key Metrics

Some commonly used metrics for Blob Storage include:

You can view these metrics in the Azure portal under the Metrics blade of your storage account. You can also query them using the Azure Monitor REST API, PowerShell, or Azure CLI.

Diagnostic Logs

Diagnostic logs capture detailed information about requests made to your storage account. These logs are invaluable for troubleshooting and auditing.

To enable diagnostic logs:

  1. Navigate to your storage account in the Azure portal.
  2. Under the Monitoring section, select Diagnostic settings.
  3. Click Add diagnostic setting.
  4. Select the log categories you want to collect (e.g., StorageRead, StorageWrite, StorageDelete).
  5. Choose a destination for the logs, such as a Log Analytics workspace, Azure Storage account, or Event Hubs.

Once enabled, you can query these logs using Log Analytics.

Log Analytics Queries

Here's an example Kusto Query Language (KQL) query to find the total number of read operations for a specific storage account in the last 24 hours:

AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STORAGE" and ResourceType == "STORAGEACCOUNTS"
| where Category == "StorageRead"
| where AccountName == "yourstorageaccountname"
| summarize count() by bin(TimeGenerated, 1h)
| render timechart

Remember to replace yourstorageaccountname with the actual name of your storage account.

Alerting

Azure Monitor allows you to create alerts based on metrics or log events. This enables you to be proactively notified when certain conditions are met.

For example, you can set up an alert to notify you if:

Third-Party Monitoring Tools

In addition to Azure Monitor, several third-party tools can provide advanced monitoring capabilities for Azure Storage. These tools often offer:

Tip: Regularly review your monitoring data and adjust your alerts as your application needs evolve.
Security Alert: Ensure that access to diagnostic logs and monitoring data is appropriately restricted to authorized personnel.

Further Reading