Windows Azure Diagnostics is a new feature in the November release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK.  It gives developers the ability to collect and store a variety of diagnostics data in a highly configurable way.

Sumit Mehrotra, a Program Manager on the Windows Azure team, has been blogging about the new diagnostics feature.  From his first post “Introducing Windows Azure Diagnostics”:

There are a number of diagnostic scenarios that go beyond simple logging. Over the past year we received a lot of feedback from customers regarding this as well. We have tried to address some of those scenarios, e.g.

• Detecting and troubleshooting problems
• Performance measurement
• Analytics and QoS
• Capacity planning
• And more…

Based on the feedback we received we wanted to keep the simplicity of the initial logging API but enhance the feature to give users more diagnostic data about their service and to give users more control of their diagnostic data. The November 2009 marks our first initial release of the Diagnostics feature.

For more information, follow Sumit’s blog and read the Windows Azure Diagnostics documentation on MSDN.  You might also want to watch Matthew Kerner’s PDC talk: “Windows Azure Monitoring, Logging, and Management APIs.”