Chapter 18. Running a healthy service in the cloud
This chapter covers
- Getting to know the Windows Azure Diagnostics platform
- Using logging to determine what’s happening with your service
- Using the service management APIs
- Making your service self-aware with logging and service management
Building an application and deploying it to Azure are just the first steps in a hopefully long application lifecycle. For the rest of its life, the application will be in operation mode, being cared for by loving IT professionals and support developers. The focus shifts from writing quality code to running the application and keeping it healthy. Many tools and techniques are out there to help you manage your infrastructure.
What healthy means can be different for every application. It might be a measure of how many simultaneous users there are, or how many transactions per second are processed, or how fast a response can be returned to the service caller. In many cases, it won’t be just one metric, but a series of metrics. You have to decide what you’re going to measure to determine a healthy state, and what those measurements must be to be considered acceptable. You must make sure these metrics are reasonable and actionable. A metric that demands that the site be as fast as possible isn’t really measurable, and it’s nearly impossible to test for and fix an issue phrased like that. Better to define the metric as an average response time for a standard request.