Use Azure Storage Metrics to get Answers

Azure Storage accounts are a critical resource in Azure. Unlike on-premises storage, some questions have to be answered differently. Questions like “How many blobs are in a storage account?”, “How much egress is happening on this account?” and “How much storage is consumed?” as well as others can be answered with Azure Storage Metrics Explorer.  

Before we go into this, it is a good time to highlight that Metrics for storage accounts is somewhat in a state of transition. Meaning, there are Metrics (Classic) in a separate Classic Monitoring set. If you are just getting started, definitely go forward on the current set of Metrics as some of the Classic Monitoring services are going to soon be deprecated. You can see this focus area in the Azure Portal, it’s a bit of a scroll down to get to these goodies. In fact, I’ve scrolled all the way to the bottom so you can see here this is in relation to other options for the storage account:

Note also that I highlighted in red the classic monitoring options that I advise not getting started with if you have not already. In Metrics, you can get some really good information about a storage account. Most of this particular storage account is blob data, but much of this logic applies to files, tables and queues as well. Let’s go through a few examples.

How many blobs are in this account?

By opening Metrics, we can select the blob count metric and optionally adjust the timeline that is displayed. As you can see, I have just under 100,000 blobs with a very large spike that finished around August 13. The good news is that this is expected, but the good information is that I have a good handle now on how many blobs are in place as shown below:

Additionally, you can filter to make these metrics based on only (or excluding) types of blob storage such as BlockBlob or PageBlob:

How much egress is happening on this account?

This is good piece of visibility not to just consider the costs, but also a view into traffic. For example, if you have an incredible amount of egress happening that you are not expecting, this may be something to investigate. In this example, I had a spike of egress when I populated this storage account; which I expected. Onward after its setup, I have had effectively no egress (not even breaking a megabyte) as shown below:

As you can see, these metrics provide some rather handy information and basically can serve as your storage administration console. These metrics can be saved, cloned or even pinned to the dashboard if some of these pieces of information would be handy for your first looks. Additionally, with the customized date ranges you have the long-term visibility to see growth, contraction or other changes in behavior and consumption.

I’ve taken the previous consumption metric example and pinned it to my dashboard, which is handy for a nice quick overview of this particular storage account. I like a 30-day view of the usage, however. The date range will likely get rest when you add a metric to the dashboard, which I was able to override once it was on the main dashboard. The nice addition is shown and highlighted below:

Now the big question is how shall I pick which metrics will make the cut for the main dashboard! Do you use metrics for your storage accounts? If so, what are your favorite metrics to run or put on your dashboard? Share your tips below.