Azure Storage Monitoring

Learn how to monitor your Azure Storage accounts effectively.

Overview of Azure Storage Monitoring

Monitoring your Azure Storage accounts is crucial for ensuring performance, availability, and cost-effectiveness. Azure Storage provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to help you track the health and usage of your storage resources.

Key aspects of monitoring include:

  • Tracking performance metrics like latency and throughput.
  • Identifying and diagnosing operational issues using logs.
  • Setting up alerts for critical events and thresholds.
  • Utilizing Azure Monitor and other integrated services.

Azure Storage Metrics

Azure Storage exposes a rich set of performance metrics through Azure Monitor. These metrics provide insights into the operational health of your storage services.

Key Metrics for Blob Storage:

  • Transactions: Total number of transactions.
  • Ingress: Total ingress in bytes.
  • Egress: Total egress in bytes.
  • Availability: Percentage of successful transactions.
  • Average E2ELatency: Average end-to-end latency.
  • Average ServerLatency: Average server latency.

Key Metrics for File Storage, Queue Storage, and Table Storage:

Similar metrics are available for other storage types, including transactions, ingress/egress, availability, and latency.

You can view these metrics in the Azure portal, query them using the Azure Monitor REST API, or integrate them into your custom dashboards.

Note: Metrics are aggregated at different granularities (e.g., per-minute, per-hour). Understanding these granularities is important for effective monitoring.

Azure Storage Diagnostic Logs

Diagnostic logs provide detailed information about operations performed on your Azure Storage accounts, including successful requests and failures. You can enable diagnostic settings to send logs to Log Analytics, Storage Accounts, or Event Hubs.

Log Categories:

  • StorageRead: Logs read operations.
  • StorageWrite: Logs write operations.
  • StorageDelete: Logs delete operations.

Analyzing Logs with Log Analytics:

Log Analytics allows you to query your storage logs using the Kusto Query Language (KQL). This is powerful for troubleshooting, performance analysis, and auditing.


StorageBlobLogs
| where OperationName == "GetBlob"
| project TimeGenerated, AccountName, CallerIPAddress, Uri, E2eRestOperationStatus
| order by TimeGenerated desc
| take 10

You can also set up workbooks and visualizations within Log Analytics to gain deeper insights into your storage activity.

Azure Storage Alerts

Alerts notify you when specific conditions are met based on metrics or log events. This proactive approach helps you respond quickly to potential issues.

Creating Metric Alerts:

You can create alerts based on thresholds for metrics like Availability dropping below a certain percentage or Average E2ELatency exceeding a limit.

Creating Log Alerts:

Log alerts can be triggered by the results of a KQL query, for example, to detect a high number of failed transactions.

Alerts can trigger various actions, including sending email notifications, calling an Azure Function, or triggering a webhook.

Tools for Monitoring Azure Storage

  • Azure Monitor: The primary service for collecting and analyzing telemetry data. It includes metrics, logs, alerts, and workbooks.
  • Log Analytics: A powerful tool for querying and analyzing diagnostic logs.
  • Azure Storage Explorer: A standalone app that makes it easy to manage Azure Storage resources, including viewing metrics.
  • Azure Advisor: Provides recommendations for optimizing your Azure resources, including storage.
  • Azure Dashboards: Customizable dashboards where you can pin metrics and charts for a consolidated view.

Best Practices for Monitoring Azure Storage

  • Enable Diagnostic Settings: Ensure logs and metrics are collected for all critical storage accounts.
  • Configure Alerts: Set up meaningful alerts for key performance indicators and error conditions.
  • Use Log Analytics: Leverage KQL for in-depth analysis and troubleshooting.
  • Monitor Availability: Keep a close eye on storage account availability to ensure service continuity.
  • Track Latency: Monitor transaction latency to identify performance bottlenecks.
  • Regularly Review Metrics: Periodically review your storage metrics to understand usage patterns and identify potential cost savings or performance improvements.
  • Implement Health Checks: Consider implementing custom health checks for your applications that rely on Azure Storage.