This is a continuation of a series of articles on hosting solutions and services on Azure public cloud with the most recent discussion on Multitenancy here This article continues to discuss troubleshooting the Azure Arc instance with data collection and reporting

Data transmitted from the Azure Arc data services can be tremendously helpful to management of resources. The ones used by Azure Arc enabled services may include: SQL MI – Azure Arc, PostgreSQL HyperScale – Azure Arc, Azure Data Studio, Azure CLI (az) and Azure Data CLI (azdata). When a cluster is configured to be directly connected to Azure, some data is automatically transmitted to Microsoft. Operational data from Metrics and Logs is automatically uploaded. Billing and Inventory data such as number of instances, and usages such as vCores consumed is automatically sent to Microsoft and is required from instances. Diagnostics information for troubleshooting purposes is not automatically sent. They must be sent on-demand. But Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) Summary is automatically sent but it must be opted.

When a cluster is not configured to be directly connected to Azure, it does not automatically transmit operational, or billing and inventory data to Microsoft. Data can be transmitted to Microsoft when it is configured to be exported. The data and mechanisms are similar to that in the directly connected mode. CEIP summary, if allowed can be automatically transmitted.

Metrics include performance and capacity related metrics, which are collected to an InfluxDB provided as part of Azure-Arc enabled data services and these can be viewed on a Grafana dashboard. This is customary for many Kubernetes products.

Logs emitted by all components are collected to an ElasticSearch database also provided as part of Azure Arc enabled data services. These logs can be viewed on the Kibana dashboard.

If the data is sent to Azure Monitor or Log Analytics, the destination region/zone can be specified and access to view can be granted to other regions.

Billing data is used for all the resources which can be categorized into three types: Azure Arc enabled SQL managed instances, PostgreSQL Hyperscale server group, SQL Server on Azure Arc enabled servers and Data controller. Every database instance and the data controller itself will be reflected in Azure as an Azure resource in the Azure Resource Manager.

The JSON data pertaining to a resource has attributes such as customObjectName, uid, instanceName, instanceNamespace, instanceType, location, resourceGroupName, subscriptionId, isDeleted, externalEndpoint, vCores, createTimestamp, and updateTimestamp.

Diagnostic data has attributes such as Error Logs which include log files capturing errors and these are restricted and shared by user. Attributes also include DMVs which can contain query and query plans but are restricted and shared by users, Views that can contain customer data but are restricted and shared by only users, Crash dumps involving customer data which has a maximum of 30 day retention of crash dumps, and statistics objects and crash dumps involving personal data which has machine names, login names, emails, locations and other identifiable information.