Customizing the Cotega Dashboard

The Cotega dashboard can be configured such that you can choose to view the charts that are important to you. The following sections outline the requirements for these charts as well as an overview of each of the charts.

Chart Requirements

Cotega is a service for monitoring SQL Azure and SQL Server databases. The purpose of Cotega is to let database administrators be notified of database issues, when they happen. Since Cotega is located outside of your data center, it gives you a true picture of the health of your database.

Chart Overview

The following section outlines the data that can be viewed within your dashboard.

• Connection Latency:  Cotega attempts to connect to your database every 10 minutes a logs the time it takes to complete this request. This connection is executed from outside of the Azure data centers giving you a true picture of latency as your users see it. For non-free accounts, this chart also shows the average latency of all other customers in this datacenter. This can be helpful to determine if connection issues are unique to your database or to the data center as a whole.
  
  
• Query Performance:  A simple query is executed from within your database and the time is logged. This chart can be a good indicator of perfomrance issues over time.
  
  
• Outstanding Requests:  Throttling is one of the most common issues DBA's face when working with Azure SQL Databases. An Azure database will be throttled when an excessive numbers of outstanding requests exist within your database. In most cases this throttling will start to happen at around 180 connections. This chart allows you to visualize outstanding connections to ensure that you are not approaching this throttling limit.
  
  
• Database Size:  This chart will monitor the total size of your database.
  
  
• Read & Write IOPS:  Microsoft is beginning to change the IOPS limits for Azure SQL databases. It is inclear yet what these limits will be. However, by monitoring read and write IOPS it will help you to track these limits as they become more apparent.
  
  
• CPU Core Utilization:  Chart that tracks the CPU utilization of your database over time.
  
  
• Memory Utilization:  Chart that tracks the memory utilization of your database over time.
  
  
• Session Count:  Chart that tracks the session counts within your database over time.
  
  
• Worker Count:  Chart that tracks the worker thread counts within your database over time.