Azure activity logs not displaying any write data - azure

I'm trying to set up logging for a storage resource (table specifically, though it seems like the activity log doesn't and just logs the entire Storage account).
The logging seems to log my ListKeys operations, occasional access from ApplicationInsights, but isn't logging any writes/reads I'm making to the tables themselves through either my app or the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. This table has been written to multiple times over the past few weeks, but yet none of that activity shows up.
Am I misinterpreting this page, which states that this activity log should track posts/deletes? Do I need any additional setup to track these operations?

Per my understanding, you could leverage Storage Analytics logging to log the operations on your storage. For the detailed operations that are logged for the corresponding storage service, you could refer to this official document.
According to your description, I have tested my operations against table storage by using REST API and Storage Explorer Tool. Here is my test result, you could refer to it.
Table Storage Analytics logging
Table Storage Metrics
As noted in this document:
As requests are logged, Storage Analytics will upload intermediate results as blocks. Periodically, Storage Analytics will commit these blocks and make them available as a blob.
In summary, please follow this tutorial to enable and configure Storage Analytics, then wait for some time and check your table storage logging.

If you are leveraging the Azure Activity log, remember that it is meant for control plane operations. So listkeys would show up there.
if you are looking for data plane operations (such as entity writes into a table), then make sure Diagnostics are turned on inside the Storage account that you are writing to.

Azure Activity Log is only for management plane records through Azure Resource Manager (ARM), specifically PUT/DELETE/POST which includes ListKeys which is an HTTP POST.
For storage analytics logging, you can use this article to see the types of data logged.

Related

Searching Storage Account with Azure Log Analytics

Using Log Analytics, is it possible to search thru data stored in a container inside an Azure storage account? We have an Azure Function that reaches out to an API in O365 for log data and then it pushes that data into a storage account. We would like to be able to query this data.
We can push content inside your container to log analytics workspace repository using something called log analytics http data collector API.
We need to build your own integration of sending container content to log analytics by leveraging http data collector API.
You may refer to the suggestion mentioned in the article
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/data-collector-api
Additional information: - Azure Functions
- Azure Automation
- Logic App
With any of these what you will do is have some schedule that will run on certain interval. When it is ran you will execute query against Log Analytics to get data. The results from the query you will transfer to Azure Storage may be as blob. You might have to do some transformation on the data depending on your scenario. The most important that you have to make sure is that you do not miss data or upload the same data twice to the storage. Log Analytics query language allows you to specify time frame for the results. I hope this will help you.
Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

Event alerts in Azure SQL using auditing

We are looking to get alerts on specific tables in a Azure DB to initiate actions.These could be
a) calling a Azure Search indexer API so that changes get indexed in near-real time every time the datasource changes
b) push updates to users via SignalR when there is an update
I understand AzureDB has functional limitations and triggers cannot invoke the Azure function directly due to lack of CLR support.
Azure SQL Database trigger to insert audit info into Azure Table
Given the triggers in Azure cannot invoke APIs, I was told that we could get information on database updates via the auditing. However, the auditing seems to be at the blob level- not at a table level
Given the multiple changes underway, it would be quite a task and time-delay to check out for the event of interest from the blob.
While there is a line around the blob auditing being configurable(supports higher granularity object-level auditing), I couldn't find an approach to limit blob updates to certain table alone. Any pointers would be appreciated
Also, given blob auditing seems to be built for threat detection/ regulatory purposes,any issues using this for event alerts?
Additional info on granular Blob Auditing in Azure SQL DB (including limiting the audit policy to specific tables/views) can be found here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/mt695939.aspx
Please note that we have also created the following OMS integration app for advanced analysis of Audit logs - you can use it to push the Blob audit logs into OMS, and then create customized alerts in OMS on top of the audit logs (this is a temporary solution, until our fully integrated OMS/Log Analytics solution is available):
https://github.com/Microsoft/Azure-SQL-DB-auditing-OMS-integration
Best Regards,
Gilad Mittelman
SQL Security, Microsoft

Azure Storage Total Requests High

I have signed up for Azure Storage the other day. I noticed today when I went into the Azure portal that there are about 500 requests per hour to the table storage. The strange thing is that I'm not using Table Storage and my site isn't live at the moment. So what could possibly be making all these requests? Any ideas?
Azure Storage has this feature called Storage Analytics which performs logging and provides metrics data for a storage account. This data gets stored in the same storage account under special tables (starting with $ e.g. $MetricsCapacityBlob). By default some analytics data is collected and this is why you're seeing these requests.
One way to check the transactions is by exploring contents of $logs blob container. It will tell you in details from where the requests to your storage accounts are being originated.
OK, mystery solved. It turns out it's the actual Azure Portal that is generating the traffic. I originally thought it was the SDK somehow making the calls, but then I had the website turned off, and the portal open, and it continued making requests. Close portal for a while, no requests.

Where is Azure Event Hub messages stored?

I generated a SAS signature using this RedDog tool and successfully sent a message to Event Hub using the Events Hub API refs. I know it was successful because I got a 201 Created response from the endpoint.
This tiny success brought about a question that I have not been able to find an answer to:
I went to the azure portal and could not see the messages I created anywhere. Further reading revealed that I needed to create a storage account; I stumbled on some C# examples (EventProcessorHost) which requires the storage account creds etc.
Question is, are there any APIs I can use to persist the data? I do not want to use the C# tool.
Please correct me if my approach is wrong, but my aim is to be able to post telemetries to EventHub, persist the data and perform some analytics operations on it. The telemetry data should be viewable on Azure.
You don't have direct access to the transient storage used for EventHub messages, but you could write a consumer that reads from the EventHub continuously and persist the messages to Azure Table or to Azure Blob.
The closest thing you will find to a way to automatically persist messages (as with Amazon Kinesis Firehose vs Amazon Kinesis which EventHubs are basically equivalent to), would be to use Azure Streaming Analytics configured to write the output either to Azure Blob or to Azure Table. This example shows how to set up a Streaming Analytics job that passes the data through and stores it in SQL, but you can see the UI where you can choose a choice such as Azure Table. Or you can get an idea of the options from the output API.
Of course you should be aware of the requirements around serialization that led to this question
The Event Hub stores data for maximum of 7 days; that’s too in standard pricing tier. If you want to persist the data for longer in a storage account, you can use the Event Hub Capture feature. You don’t have to write a single line of code to achieve this. You can configure it through Portal or ARM template. This is described in this document - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-capture-overview
The event hub stores it’s transient data in Azure storage. It doesn’t give any more detail in relation to the data storage. This is evident from this documentation - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/configure-customer-managed-key
The storage account you need for EventProcessorHost is only used for checkpointing or maintaining the offset of the last read event in a partition.

Azure storage metrics data

I am trying to implement azure storage metrics code in my role but i am checking if there is easy way to get azure storage metric data about my files usage. my code is stable and i do not want to change code again.
Actually if you already have Windows Azure role running, then you don't need to make any changes to your code and you still can get Windows Azure Blob storage Metrics data.
I have written a blog about it last time as Collecting Windows Azure Storage REST API level metrics data without a single line of programming, just by using tools
Please try above and see if this works for you.
Storage analytics is disabled by default, so any operations against your storage up til now has not been logged for analysis.
You may choose to enable analytics at any time, for both logging (detailed access information for every single object) and metrics (hourly rollups). Further, you may choose which specific storage service to track (blobs, tables, queues) and which operations to track (read, write, delete). Once analytics are enabled, you may access the resulting analytics data from any app (as long as you have the storage account name + key).
Persistent Systems just published a blog post on enabling storage analytics for Java apps. The same principles may be applied to a .net app (and the sdk's are very similar).
Additionally, Full Scale 180 published a sample app encapsulating storage analytics (based on REST API, as it was written before SDK v1.6 came out).

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