Monitoring Azure Storage

This document provides comprehensive guidance on monitoring your Azure Storage accounts to ensure optimal performance, availability, and cost efficiency. We'll cover key metrics, tools, and best practices.

Key Monitoring Tools

Azure provides several powerful tools to monitor your storage resources:

• Azure Monitor

  Azure Monitor is the foundational monitoring service for Azure resources. It collects and analyzes telemetry from your storage accounts, allowing you to gain insights into performance, availability, and operational data.

  • Metrics: Collects real-time and historical data for various storage aspects.
  • Logs: Stores diagnostic logs for in-depth analysis.
  • Alerts: Configurable rules to notify you of specific conditions.
  • Dashboards: Customizable views for visualizing key metrics.

• Azure Storage Explorer

  While primarily a management tool, Azure Storage Explorer can display basic operational metrics and error counts for your storage services, offering a quick overview.

• Application Insights

  For applications heavily reliant on Azure Storage, Application Insights can correlate application performance with storage operations, identifying bottlenecks in the end-to-end user experience.

Essential Metrics to Monitor

Focus on these critical metrics to understand the health and performance of your Azure Storage:

Availability Metrics

Performance Metrics

Capacity Metrics

Configuring Diagnostics and Logging

To leverage Azure Monitor effectively, you need to enable diagnostic settings for your storage accounts.

1. Navigate to your Azure Storage account in the Azure portal.
2. Under the "Monitoring" section, select "Diagnostic settings".
3. Click "Add diagnostic setting".
4. Select the categories of logs and metrics you want to collect (e.g., StorageRead, StorageWrite, StorageDelete, Transaction, etc.).
5. Choose a destination for your logs:
   • Send to Log Analytics workspace
   • Archive to a storage account
   • Stream to an event hub
6. Save the diagnostic setting.

Once configured, you can query logs in Log Analytics or visualize metrics on Azure Dashboards.

Example Kusto Query (Log Analytics)

StorageBlobLogs
| where OperationName == "GetBlob"
| where StatusCode startswith "2" // Successful requests
| summarize count() by bin(TimeGenerated, 1h)
| order by TimeGenerated asc

Setting Up Alerts

Create alert rules in Azure Monitor to be notified when specific conditions are met.

• Alert type: Metric alert
• Target: Your storage account
• Condition: Choose a metric (e.g., Availability, Transactions), select an operator (e.g., less than, greater than), and set a threshold value.
• Actions: Define an action group to send notifications (email, SMS, webhook) or trigger automated remediation.

Best Practices for Storage Monitoring

• Regularly review dashboards: Maintain custom dashboards tailored to your critical storage metrics.
• Set up meaningful alerts: Configure alerts for thresholds that indicate potential issues, not just for every minor fluctuation.
• Analyze trends: Look for patterns in performance and usage over time to anticipate future needs or problems.
• Correlate with application logs: If possible, tie storage metrics with application logs to understand the impact of storage performance on your applications.
• Monitor costs: Keep an eye on egress costs, transaction volume, and capacity utilization to manage expenses effectively.
• Utilize Azure Advisor: Azure Advisor provides recommendations for optimizing storage performance and cost based on your usage patterns.