Turning On Diagnostics in Azure eats up transactions - MACommand.xml

Question

We were just trying out the Azure Storage Analytics Service, and something very unusual caught our attention.

The transaction count for the diagnostics storage account ( the account to which the Diagnostics Service writes it's data) was extremely high. We are talking about 600~ transaction per hour, all of which are GetBlob() operations, and all of them ended with error ( ClientOtherError is equal to the total number of operations ). Further investigation revealed that each instance running which has Diagnostics turned on, produces 300~ transactions per hour ( we has 2 instances, thus the 600). Continuing the investigation, looking at the $logs that the Analytics Service is producing revealed what really going on :

The log is filled with lots of calls to an xml file that's not exists. The log file itself is very cluttered but it's very clear that most of the calls are searching for

https://****.blob.core.windows.net/mam/MACommand.xml and also /mam/MACommanda.xml and /mam/MACommandb.xml

all those calls have an error of 404.

This issue is a real problem for us, and we have no idea what causing it.

Has anyone encountered this issue ?

(edit: Forgot to mention, the Diagnostics Service is not logging anything - scheduledTransferPeriod is zero for all the categories)

Answer 1

Those transactions are an expected behavior since SDK 1.6. See full explanation here:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuretroubleshooting/thread/2e2f46dd-638a-4af1-b8ac-cfd7659a3171