Two days ago I blogged about my first Windows Azure application Tweetpoll that I set into motion sometime on the morning of 6th May 2009 (i.e. 2 days ago). I’ve just been to the Azure portal to check out what metrics Microsoft are measuring.
Here’s my hourly virtual machine usage:
and the same data but per day:
At approximately 1400 BST today (8th May 2009) I upped Tweetpool to use two worker and two web roles (previously it was using just one of each):
and straightaway the impact on hourly usage was obvious as usage for that following hour virtually doubled.
Bandwidth usage data was not available.
There are some obvious (and dull) takeaways from this; virtual machine usage is simply a summation of the amount of time that each role instance is running. Azure costings are due to be made available this summer and I wouldn’t be surprised to see us having to pay per hour of virtual machine usage.
Other things to note.
- Metrics are shown for all of your hosted services. Currently we are only allowed one hosted service per Live ID (which, I think, equates to a billing account) so this isn’t a problem but I assume that they’ll eventually allow us to have multiple hosted services per billing account. If so one would hope the analytics page would differentiate per hosted service.
- Virtual Machine usage hours are extremely dull. I would be much more interested in seeing actual usage stats such as how many times each page on my web role has been accessed and how many log records have been written rather than simply how long my service had been “up”.
- There is no slice-and-dice functionality. Given that adCenter Analytics (RIP) provided demographical analysis (as I reported previously) I see no reason why similar shouldn’t be available for Azure web roles.
- Data is not available for us to consume offline and conduct our own analysis; there could be a great value for a service developer in being able to analyse web log and service log records. If and when this changes I wouldn’t be surprised to see a startup establish itself as a purveyor of detailed Azure analyses – there could be a big market for that.
In summary, the analytics available for Azure hosted services don’t provide anything of note for service developers, they simply tell you what you’re going to have to pay for.
-Jamie