Chapter 14. Azure Monitoring and Diagnostics

When we host a site on our own servers, we have complete and direct access to the event logs, the IIS logs, and the performance counters. When something is amiss, these resources are our first stop for diagnostic information, and more often than not, the answer is found in these resources. Because we can't access an Azure instance in the same way as we connect via Remote Desktop to our on-premises server, how do we get the same information? Fortunately, Microsoft has provided mechanisms for us, and that's what we'll explore here (Microsoft has announced Remote Desktop access to Azure instances, as well as improved diagnostics, but those are not available at the time of writing). In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Examining what information can be collected via Azure diagnostics

• Learning how to enable collection of diagnostic data

• Implementing diagnostic data collection in our portal app

• Persisting collected data in the proper storage...