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Azure Redis Cache diagnostic improvements

Early next year, we will transition Azure Redis Cache’s telemetry infrastructure to the new Azure Monitor service, thereby enhancing its monitoring and alerting experiences.

Early next year, we will transition Azure Redis Cache’s telemetry infrastructure to the new Azure Monitor service, thereby enhancing its monitoring and alerting experiences. Customers will enjoy the following benefits from this upgrade:

  • Getting service metrics out of the box – Today you need to create an Azure Storage account and configure Azure Redis to write metrics data to that account in order to monitor or alert for your cache. After the change, this is no longer required. All caches will automatically display metrics in the Azure service portal. These new Redis metrics data also will be accessible through Azure Monitor service’s REST API. If you have a need to retain metrics for longer than 30 days, you may still export it to your own storage account for archiving and offline analysis.
  • Managing alerts more effectively – With alert rules, Azure Monitor service allows you to add trigger conditions on metrics and events and it will notify you using standard channels (e.g., email, webhook) when any of the conditions is met. In addition, you will have more granular control over how alerts are configured. You will be able to set up alerts for each cache instance separately, instead of on a region and subscription basis currently.
  • Integrating with 3rd-party tools – Logs from Azure Redis will be streamed in near realtime to an Event Hub. This makes events from your cache instance available to 3rd party logging analytics systems, SIEMs, or custom telemetry pipelines almost instantaneously. Azure Monitor has a set of partners today who can ingest this data and the list of ecosystem partners is growing continuously.

We will update the Azure Redis service in multiple phases starting at the beginning of January 2017. We plan to complete the rollout for all Azure regions within the month.

The update will be seamless for most users, who will simply see the new metrics appearing in the portal. You can start setting up alerts should you so choose. If you are reading the Azure Redis metrics through the Azure Insights library, you just need to upgrade to the latest library version. If you access the metrics data directly from a storage account, however, you will need to change your tool to use either the Azure Insights library or Azure Monitor REST API, or to reconfigure a storage account for exporting and archiving the data. Azure Monitoring REST API Walkthrough provides a good overview of how to programmatically access Azure resource metrics. To facilitate migrating your tool, Azure Redis will continue to write metrics data to your current account until the end of February 2017. It will only publish data to Azure Monitor service after that time. We would encourage you to make the necessary modifications as early as possible.

We hope that you will like the new Azure Redis metrics. Please share with us your thoughts when you have a chance to try them out.