Wrap up of my talk for Azure Florida Association

June 03, 2012 (Last Modified: June 03, 2012)

Last week I gave a presentation on Windows Azure Diagnostics for the Azure Florida Association. It was an online session and they have a recording as well (NOTE: The recording may not be up for long). The materials for the presentation can be downloaded from my skydrive. Keep in mind that the cloud platforms move pretty quick, so if you are reading this post sometime in the future the information may not be applicable anymore.

I’d like to provide a few links to some resources I mentioned or some of the tools I used during the talk.

Links to helpful Blog posts or Documentation:

Documentation for Windows Azure Diagnostics: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433048
Choosing What to Monitor in Windows Azure by Ryan Dunn
Configure Windows Azure Diagnostics – One Config to Rule Them All by Cory Fowler
Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability Targets by the Storage Account Team

Tools:

Cloud Storage Studio 2 by Cerebrata / Red Gate – For exploring and working with your Windows Azure storage accounts. This is a must have for Windows Azure developers working with Storage accounts.
Azure Diagnostics Manager 2 by Cerebrata / Red Gate – For viewing your diagnostics data from Windows Azure stored in your storage accounts. Provides great graphical representations for perf counters, etc.
LINQPad – Mini-IDE for C# and VB.NET, great for examples, trying things out or learning about LINQ.
Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets by Microsoft – Great for automating all sorts of tasks like working with your services and storage accounts.
WCF Test Client by Microsoft – Ships with Visual Studio and I’m always surprised by how many people aren’t aware of this. You can use it to quickly test WCF endpoints.
AzureOps by Opstera – A Software as a Service offering to do monitoring and auto scaling. Great for looking at the health of your application over long periods of time.
AzureWatch by Paraleap – Another option for monitoring and auto-scaling.
Greybox by, uh, Me – Used for presenters, developers, etc. to be alerted if they left something running in Windows Azure.

Also, at the end of the presentation a gentlemen asked me about the relationship between Diagnostics management and the “Windows Azure Trust” settings for roles. I’m answering that in a blog post that is coming up next.

Since this group is an online group, you definitely don’t have to be in Florida to get great content from them. Join the group on LinkedIn and start attending the meetings.