Question

I am searching for a solution to find out if a particular service is running or not on Windows Azure’s webrole.

I have developed and deployed two applications on Windows Azure. First one is my main web application and second is one to host a service (simple console application, put in bin directory and run that).

Now, from my main web application i would like to do a smoke test to fint out if my service is running or not.

I’d be happy for suggestions on wether i am doing it the right way or if there are more sophisticated approaches.

Thanks
Arun.

Answer 1

In general it’s good practice to design services to include a “status reporting” or “health check” method call of some sort.

This becomes even more important when running under a hosted infrastructure like Azure as you may have many instances of a service available.

At the very least this should return an “OK” response if the service is available. Depending on what the service does and its dependencies it could go further and return

• the version number of the service and any dependent services, databases, etc.
• whether dependent services are also running, e.g. databases, table storage, etc.
• the physical name and IP address of the machine (useful for debugging)
• the server time (often important in a virtualised application)
• environmental data such as configuration settings

You might also want to supplement the regular Azure diagnostic counts with some of your own, such as free disk space, number of requests per second, average response rate per second over the last five minutes, and suchlike.