I have an Azure Cloud Service Worker Role that I'm using to maintain a Lucene Index. The service has been completely removed from Azure twice. The first time I thought someone may have inadvertently deleted, but I don't believe this to be the case. Has anyone else ran into this issue? Are there any logs/dashboards in Azure that may help me determine why this service is completely disappearing?
MS understands the Importance of your data/service so its highly unlikely that your service will be removed automatically. In order to check about your service you can go to Management Service and check out operation logs within the timeframe when your service was up and now you can filter your service from the results.You can check the Caller ID to check who deleted the service in your case.Check this blog post for checking logs about Azure Mobile Service.
If above is not the case I highly recommend to contact the customer support immediately they will be able to provide you details about your service and can help you in recovering the service if possible.
Related
Is there anyway we can get notified in case of Azure PaaS service is down? example Storage account or Load balancer etc?
Thank you rickvdbosch. Posting your suggestion as an answer to help other community members.
You can set Health alerts. "Azure Service Health notifies you about Azure service incidents and planned maintenance so you can take action to mitigate downtime. Configure customizable cloud alerts and use your personalized dashboard to analyze health issues, monitor the impact to your cloud resources, get guidance and support, and share details and updates."
can we add specific service in the service health?
In Service Health, choose the Potential impact tab to see the specific list of resources you own that might be impacted by the issue. You can download a CSV list of these resources to share with your team.
We have Azure environment with 3 different subscription and around 5 project resources are deployed in this environment.
Each project team has rights to create resources under specific Resource Group (RG) within Azure.
Now from Azure Admin perspective, i would like to know Who, When
This is basic requirements for any organization to track their cost, resource information. When i looked in Azure, this information is not available directly at resource level.
Few posts are mentioning to use Tagging for this or use logs (2 years back, really?)? Is it? I am surprised.
Can i use Application Insight for this? or only available for App Service kind of services?
Please help me to get this information in efficient way
Your only option is to implement some sort of logging (like poll Azure Subscription events) and save it somewhere. You can use Azure Monitor to achieve that rather easily. But by itself Azure doesnt offer anything like that out of the box.
you can use tagging, but with obvious challenges. logs only go 3 months back.
I have an Azure WebApp that continually reports "Your app experienced failure(s) due to a transient storage access issue." The suggested solution is "Explore Local Cache feature for your web app." but my webapp exceeds the maximum storage (3GB) for this option.
The problem mostly occurs between midnight and 6am in the morning when the site is LEAST active, but there seems to be an increasing number of occurrences during the day.
What are the underlying causes of this problem? Is this something to do with my WebApp or is it the Azure Infrastructure. In either case, how do I determine the underlying issue(s) and resolve?
"Your app experienced failure(s) due to a transient storage access issue."
The Web Apps environment provides diagnostic functionality for logging information from both the web server and the web application. You could try to enable Logging and check the logs that generated within that period of time.
According to the error, it seems that a temporary issue causes app failure, and it suggests enabling local cache. You could follow the suggested solution and make sure if it helps resolve issue.
Besides, you could try to scale your web app (which would take additional charge) and check if it could mitigate the issue.
Updates:
As we know App Service offers a shared, persistent storage for the application. Maybe something wrong with the shared storage when the instances in farm access the storage, which may be the cause of the issue.
To determine the underlying issue, you may try to enable diagnostics logging for your web app. This should provide more information on what is happening at the storage level and what kind of activity is going on.
Is there any way to get Azure status update only for some services and regions I am using? For example, I am using Cloud Services in West US. When this service in West US is down, I want to get an alert for it. I don't care about other services and other regions.
If you set up alert notifications for your application, you'll get notified when any of the underlying services you're using are not functioning properly. An alert will ensure that your service is available and working.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/insights-receive-alert-notifications/
If you get an alert about a service issue, that's when I would first take a look at the Azure status dashboard, and then take a look at your application logs to troubleshoot.
Another trick is to create simple URL's in your application that do a quick service test. For example, let's say you're using blob storage in the west datacenter. You could set up a page that does a test write/read to ensure that service is working. This will give you a 100% accurate indication if there is a problem. Since the cloud is highly distributed, and services statuses don't update immediately, I find this method highly preferable.
You would then point your alert monitoring at URL's like this:
http://yourapp.com/
http://yourapp.com/blobtest
http://yourapp.com/redistest
The Azure Status website has the information your need for all Azure regions.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/
We currently have a window service which send some notification emails to users after doing some processing on database(SQL database). Runs once in day.
We want to move this on azure cloud. One alternate is to put it on Azure VM as is. but I am finding some other best possible solution for that.
I study about recurring and on demand Web jobs but I am not sure is this is best solution.
Also is there any possibility to update configuration of service code in App.config without re-deploy the code of service on cloud. I means we can manage configuration from Azure portal.
Thanks in advance.
Update 11/4/2016
Since this was written, there are 2 additional features available in Azure that are both excellent choices depending on what functionality you need:
Azure Functions (which was based on the WebJobs described below): Serverless code that can be trigger/invoked in various ways, and has scaling support.
Azure Service Fabric: Microservice platform, with support for actor model, stateful and stateless services.
You've got 3 basic options:
Windows service running on VM
WebJob
Cloud service
There's a lot of information out there on the tradeoffs between these choices, but here's a brief summary.
VM - Advantages: you can move your service basically as it is without having to change much or any of your code. They also have the easiest connectivity with other resources in Azure (blob storage, virtual networks, etc). The disadvantage is you're giving up all the of PaaS advantages and are still stuck managing your own VM infrastructure
WebJob - Advantages: Multiple invocation options (queues, blobs, manually, queue receive loops, continuous while-loop style, etc), scheduled (would cover your case). Easy to deploy (can go with website, as a console app, automatically through Kudu), has some built in logging in Azure portal - and yes, to answer your question, you can alter the configuration in the portal itself for connection strings and app settings.
Disadvantages - you'll need to update code, you don't have access to underlying resources (if you need that), and more of something to keep in mind than a disadvantage - it uses the same resources as the webapp it's deployed with.
Web Jobs are the newest of the options, but at the same time appear to have active development going on to increase the functionality and usefulness.
Cloud Service - like a managed VM, has some deployment options, access to underlying VM if needed. Would require some code changes from your existing service.
There's nothing you've mentioned in your use case that makes me think a Web Job shouldn't be first thing you try.
(Edit: Troy Hunt has a great and relatively recent blog post illustrating most of the points I've mentioned about Web Jobs above: http://www.troyhunt.com/2015/01/azure-webjobs-are-awesome-and-you.html)