I am the founder of a startup called Cotega and also a Microsoft employee where I work as a Program Manager. This is a series of posts where I talk about my experience building a startup outside of Microsoft. I do my best to take my Microsoft hat off and tell both the good parts and the bad parts I experienced using Azure.
Working on a monitoring service for SQL Azure Azure SQL Database allows me to get a really good idea of the common issues DBA’s have when working with their database. If I had to choose the most common area of frustration I hear from DBA’s is whether their performance issue is related only to their database or to the entire data center where their database is hosted? It has been a goal of mine from the very early days of Cotega to help solve this problem. Today I am happy to announce that within Cotega, you are now able to see your performance data overlayed with that of the data centers performance. As you can see below, here is an example of connection latency done from outside the Azure data centers. It shows the connection latency of my database (in blue) along with the average latency of all other customers in this datacenter (in orange).
This has taken me some time to build because in order to get a true picture of the data center you are in, I needed to have enough customers in each of the data centers such that I could get an aggregated average of all the data gathered from the monitoring of these database without exposing any information about any one customers performance data.
As of right now, I have a really good picture of all the major Azure data centers (with the exception of East Asia). In fact, even without a Cotega account, you can see the status of each of the data centers here. Please note that this data is related only to that of SQL Database and does not reflect that of other Azure services.
I hope that all of you will consider creating an account to help everyone create an absolutely perfect picture of the health of SQL Azure database data centers. To learn more about how to create an account, please visit www.cotega.com.
Liam