Monitor Azure Stream Analytics

  • Article

This article describes:

  • The types of monitoring data you can collect for this service.
  • How to analyze that data.

Note

If you're already familiar with this service and/or Azure Monitor and just want to know how to analyze monitoring data, see the Analyze section near the end of this article.

When you have critical applications and business processes that rely on Azure resources, you need to monitor and get alerts for your system. The Azure Monitor service collects and aggregates metrics and logs from every component of your system. Azure Monitor provides you with a view of availability, performance, and resilience, and notifies you of issues. You can use the Azure portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, REST API, or client libraries to set up and view monitoring data.

For instructions on how to monitor and manage Azure Stream Analytics resources with Azure PowerShell cmdlets and PowerShell scripting, see Monitor and manage Stream Analytics jobs with Azure PowerShell cmdlets.

Resource types

Azure uses the concept of resource types and IDs to identify everything in a subscription. Azure Monitor similarly organizes core monitoring data into metrics and logs based on resource types, also called namespaces. Different metrics and logs are available for different resource types. Your service might be associated with more than one resource type.

Resource types are also part of the resource IDs for every resource running in Azure. For example, one resource type for a virtual machine is Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines. For a list of services and their associated resource types, see Resource providers. For more information about the resource types for Azure Stream Analytics, see Azure Stream Analytics monitoring data reference.

Data storage

For Azure Monitor:

  • Metrics data is stored in the Azure Monitor metrics database.
  • Log data is stored in the Azure Monitor logs store. Log Analytics is a tool in the Azure portal that can query this store.
  • The Azure activity log is a separate store with its own interface in the Azure portal.
  • You can optionally route metric and activity log data to the Azure Monitor logs database store so you can query the data and correlate it with other log data using Log Analytics.
  • By using diagnostic settings, many services can send metric and log data to other storage locations outside Azure Monitor. Examples include Azure Storage, non-Azure third party systems using Event Hubs.

For detailed information on how Azure Monitor stores data, see Azure Monitor data platform. Start with the article Monitoring Azure resources with Azure Monitor, which describes the following concepts:

Azure Monitor platform metrics

Azure Monitor provides platform metrics for most services. These metrics are:

  • Individually defined for each namespace.
  • Stored in the Azure Monitor time-series metrics database.
  • Lightweight and capable of supporting near real-time alerting.
  • Used to track the performance of a resource over time.

Collection: Azure Monitor collects platform metrics automatically. No configuration is required.

Routing: You can also usually route platform metrics to Azure Monitor logs / Log Analytics so you can query them with other log data. For more information, see the Metrics diagnostic setting. For how to configure diagnostic settings for a service, see Create diagnostic settings in Azure Monitor.

For a list of all metrics it's possible to gather for all resources in Azure Monitor, see Supported metrics in Azure Monitor.

Azure Stream Analytics metrics

For a description of how to monitor metrics in the Azure portal, see Monitor Stream Analytics job with Azure portal.

Note

Azure Stream Analytics jobs that are created via REST APIs, Azure SDK, or PowerShell don't have monitoring enabled by default. To enable monitoring, follow the steps in Programmatically create a Stream Analytics job monitor. The monitoring data then appears in the Metrics area of the Azure portal page for your Stream Analytics job.

The following table lists conditions and corrective actions for some commonly monitored Azure Stream Analytics metrics.

Metric Condition Time aggregation Threshold Corrective actions
SU (Memory) % Utilization Greater than Average 80 Multiple factors increase the utilization of SUs. You can scale with query parallelization or increase the number of SUs. For more information, see Leverage query parallelization in Azure Stream Analytics.
CPU % Utilization Greater than Average 90 This likely means that some operations (such as user-defined functions, user-defined aggregates, or complex input deserialization) are requiring a lot of CPU cycles. You can usually overcome this problem by increasing the number of SUs for the job.
Runtime Errors Greater than Total 0 Examine the activity or resource logs and make appropriate changes to the inputs, query, or outputs.
Watermark Delay Greater than Average When the average value of this metric over the last 15 minutes is greater than the late arrival tolerance (in seconds). If you haven't modified the late arrival tolerance, the default is set to 5 seconds. Try increasing the number of SUs or parallelizing your query. For more information on SUs, see Understand and adjust streaming units. For more information on parallelizing your query, see Leverage query parallelization in Azure Stream Analytics.
Input Deserialization Errors Greater than Total 0 Examine the activity or resource logs and make appropriate changes to the input. For more information on resource logs, see Troubleshoot Azure Stream Analytics by using resource logs.

For a list and descriptions of all available metrics for Azure Stream Analytics, see Azure Stream Analytics monitoring data reference.

Azure Monitor resource logs

Resource logs provide insight into operations that were done by an Azure resource. Logs are generated automatically, but you must route them to Azure Monitor logs to save or query them. Logs are organized by category. A given namespace might have multiple resource log categories.

Collection: Resource logs aren't collected and stored until you create a diagnostic setting and route the logs to one or more locations. When you create a diagnostic setting, you specify which categories of logs to collect. There are multiple ways to create and maintain diagnostic settings, including the Azure portal, programmatically, and though Azure Policy.

Routing: The suggested default is to route resource logs to Azure Monitor Logs so you can query them with other log data. Other locations such as Azure Storage, Azure Event Hubs, and certain Microsoft monitoring partners are also available. For more information, see Azure resource logs and Resource log destinations.

For detailed information about collecting, storing, and routing resource logs, see Diagnostic settings in Azure Monitor.

For a list of all available resource log categories in Azure Monitor, see Supported resource logs in Azure Monitor.

All resource logs in Azure Monitor have the same header fields, followed by service-specific fields. The common schema is outlined in Azure Monitor resource log schema.

Azure Stream Analytics logs

Azure Stream Analytics captures two categories of resource logs:

  • Authoring: Captures log events that are related to job authoring operations, such as job creation, adding and deleting inputs and outputs, adding and updating the query, and starting or stopping the job.

  • Execution: Captures events that occur during job execution.

    • Connectivity errors
    • Data processing errors, including:
      • Events that don�t conform to the query definition (mismatched field types and values, missing fields, and so on)
      • Expression evaluation errors
    • Other events and errors

For the available resource log categories, their associated Log Analytics tables, and the log schemas for Azure Stream Analytics, see Azure Stream Analytics monitoring data reference.

For a detailed walkthrough of how to troubleshoot Azure Stream Analytics job failures by using resource logs, see Troubleshoot Azure Stream Analytics by using resource logs.

Azure activity log

The activity log contains subscription-level events that track operations for each Azure resource as seen from outside that resource; for example, creating a new resource or starting a virtual machine.

Collection: Activity log events are automatically generated and collected in a separate store for viewing in the Azure portal.

Routing: You can send activity log data to Azure Monitor Logs so you can analyze it alongside other log data. Other locations such as Azure Storage, Azure Event Hubs, and certain Microsoft monitoring partners are also available. For more information on how to route the activity log, see Overview of the Azure activity log.

For a detailed walkthrough of how to troubleshoot Azure Stream Analytics job failures by using the activity log, see Debugging using activity logs.

Analyze monitoring data

There are many tools for analyzing monitoring data.

Azure Monitor tools

Azure Monitor supports the following basic tools:

Tools that allow more complex visualization include:

  • Dashboards that let you combine different kinds of data into a single pane in the Azure portal.
  • Workbooks, customizable reports that you can create in the Azure portal. Workbooks can include text, metrics, and log queries.
  • Grafana, an open platform tool that excels in operational dashboards. You can use Grafana to create dashboards that include data from multiple sources other than Azure Monitor.
  • Power BI, a business analytics service that provides interactive visualizations across various data sources. You can configure Power BI to automatically import log data from Azure Monitor to take advantage of these visualizations.

Azure Monitor export tools

You can get data out of Azure Monitor into other tools by using the following methods:

To get started with the REST API for Azure Monitor, see Azure monitoring REST API walkthrough.

Kusto queries

You can analyze monitoring data in the Azure Monitor Logs / Log Analytics store by using the Kusto query language (KQL).

Important

When you select Logs from the service's menu in the portal, Log Analytics opens with the query scope set to the current service. This scope means that log queries will only include data from that type of resource. If you want to run a query that includes data from other Azure services, select Logs from the Azure Monitor menu. See Log query scope and time range in Azure Monitor Log Analytics for details.

For a list of common queries for any service, see the Log Analytics queries interface.

Sample queries

Following are sample queries that you can use to help monitor your Azure Stream Analytics resources:

  • List all input data errors. The following query shows all errors that occurred while processing the data from inputs.

    AzureDiagnostics 
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STREAMANALYTICS" and parse_json(properties_s).Type == "DataError" 
| project TimeGenerated, Resource, Region_s, OperationName, properties_s, Level, _ResourceId

  • Events that arrived late. The following query shows errors due to events where difference between application time and arrival time is greater than the late arrival policy.

    AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STREAMANALYTICS" and  parse_json(properties_s).DataErrorType == "LateInputEvent"
| project TimeGenerated, Resource, Region_s, OperationName, properties_s, Level, _ResourceId

  • Events that arrived early. The following query shows errors due to events where difference between Application time and Arrival time is greater than 5 minutes.

    AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STREAMANALYTICS" and parse_json(properties_s).DataErrorType == "EarlyInputEvent"
| project TimeGenerated, Resource, Region_s, OperationName, properties_s, Level, _ResourceId

  • Events that arrived out of order. The following query shows errors due to events that arrive out of order according to the out-of-order policy.

    // To create an alert for this query, click '+ New alert rule'
AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STREAMANALYTICS" and parse_json(properties_s).DataErrorType == "OutOfOrderEvent"
| project TimeGenerated, Resource, Region_s, OperationName, properties_s, Level, _ResourceId

  • All output data errors. The following query shows all errors that occurred while writing the results of the query to the outputs in your job.

    AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STREAMANALYTICS" and parse_json(properties_s).DataErrorType in ("OutputDataConversionError.RequiredColumnMissing", "OutputDataConversionError.ColumnNameInvalid", "OutputDataConversionError.TypeConversionError", "OutputDataConversionError.RecordExceededSizeLimit", "OutputDataConversionError.DuplicateKey")
| project TimeGenerated, Resource, Region_s, OperationName, properties_s, Level, _ResourceId

  • The following query shows the summary of failed operations in the last seven days.

    AzureDiagnostics
| where TimeGenerated > ago(7d) //last 7 days
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.STREAMANALYTICS" and status_s == "Failed" 
| summarize Count=count(), sampleEvent=any(properties_s) by JobName=Resource

Alerts

Azure Monitor alerts proactively notify you when specific conditions are found in your monitoring data. Alerts allow you to identify and address issues in your system before your customers notice them. For more information, see Azure Monitor alerts.

There are many sources of common alerts for Azure resources. For examples of common alerts for Azure resources, see Sample log alert queries. The Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts (AMBA) site provides an semi-automated method of implementing important platform metric alerts, dashboards, and guidelines. The site applies to a continually expanding subset of Azure services, including all services that are part of the Azure Landing Zone (ALZ).

The common alert schema standardizes the consumption of Azure Monitor alert notifications. For more information, see Common alert schema.

Types of alerts

You can alert on any metric or log data source in the Azure Monitor data platform. There are many different types of alerts depending on the services you're monitoring and the monitoring data you're collecting. Different types of alerts have various benefits and drawbacks. For more information, see Choose the right monitoring alert type.

The following list describes the types of Azure Monitor alerts you can create:

  • Metric alerts evaluate resource metrics at regular intervals. Metrics can be platform metrics, custom metrics, logs from Azure Monitor converted to metrics, or Application Insights metrics. Metric alerts can also apply multiple conditions and dynamic thresholds.
  • Log alerts allow users to use a Log Analytics query to evaluate resource logs at a predefined frequency.
  • Activity log alerts trigger when a new activity log event occurs that matches defined conditions. Resource Health alerts and Service Health alerts are activity log alerts that report on your service and resource health.

Some Azure services also support smart detection alerts, Prometheus alerts, or recommended alert rules.

For some services, you can monitor at scale by applying the same metric alert rule to multiple resources of the same type that exist in the same Azure region. Individual notifications are sent for each monitored resource. For supported Azure services and clouds, see Monitor multiple resources with one alert rule.

Azure Stream Analytics alert rules

The following table lists some suggested alert rules for Azure Stream Analytics. These alerts are just examples. You can set alerts for any metric, log entry, or activity log entry listed in the Azure Stream Analytics monitoring data reference.

Alert type Condition Description
Platform metrics Streaming unit (SU) Memory Utilization Whenever average SU (Memory) % Utilization is greater than 80%
Activity log Failed operations Whenever the activity log has an event with Category='Administrative', Signal name='All Administrative operations', Status='Failed'

For detailed instructions on how to set up an alert for Azure Stream Analytics, see Set up alerts for Azure Stream Analytics jobs.

Advisor recommendations

For some services, if critical conditions or imminent changes occur during resource operations, an alert displays on the service Overview page in the portal. You can find more information and recommended fixes for the alert in Advisor recommendations under Monitoring in the left menu. During normal operations, no advisor recommendations display.

For more information on Azure Advisor, see Azure Advisor overview.

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