Alongside the developer services that were added to Azure at its Build event this week, Microsoft Corp. rolled out new monitoring functionality designed to help customers keep a closer eye on their cloud deployments. Headlining the release is a tool called Service Profiler that promises to ease the chore of identifying performance issues by visualizing application behavior in a graphical dashboard.

The operational statistics displayed on the console are generated through a sampling process that involves isolating one in every few requests sent to a workload and collecting key information like how fast it’s processed. Service Profiler then analyzes the individual measurements to identify the median response time, which is used as a benchmark for distinguishing queries that are handled too slowly. The entire task is performed in real-time, a feature that Microsoft says can enable administrators to investigate a performance issue while it’s ongoing instead of having to reproduce the problem in a test environment after the fact.

The company hopes to help organizations speed up troubleshooting even more with the enhanced alerting functionality that debuted against the backdrop of Service Profiler. The addition introduces the ability to have a reboot or some other remedial action automatically executed when a virtual machine generates an error message. Administrators can specify exactly which operation should be performed in response to what notification so as to maximize the chances of the issue getting solved without manual intervention.

The feature thereby kills two birds with one stone and speeds up resolution times while enabling the IT department to spend its valuable resources on more productive work than restarting VMs. Microsoft hopes that Azure will now be able to put up a better fight on the automation front against rivals like Google Inc.’s GCP, which conspicuously also received new monitoring functionality a few days ago.

Image via Geralt