Understanding Diagnostics in Windows Azure

 

Windows Azure diagnostics provides facility to store diagnostics data. Azure diagnostics supports logging and monitoring of diagnostics data. It uses blob service or table service to save diagnostics data, depending on the diagnostics data. Before logs are saved in a container they are indexed in WADDirectoriesTable table in the storage account.
Following diagnostics data is stored in table storage:

Data Source	Table name in Azure Storage	Detail
Windows Azure Logs	WADLogsTable	These are the application logs dumped from the application.
Windows Azure Diagnostics Infrastructure Logs	WADDiagnosticInfrastructureLogsTable	These are the logs about running of diagnostics service.
Windows Event logs	WADWindowsEventLogsTable	These are the logs generated on the instance where logs are running.
Performance counters	WADPerformanceCountersTable	These are the performance matrices like memory utilization, processor utilization, response time etc.

Following diagnostics data is stored in blob storage:

Data Source	Container name in azure storage	Detail
IIS Logs	wad-iis-logfiles	These are the IIS logs generated by role instances.
Failed Request Logs	wad-iis-failedreqlogfiles	These are the IIS failed requests logs generated by role instances.
Crash Dumps	wad-crash-dumps	These are the logs generated on the application crash.