Overview

The Azure Management plugin gives Rock administrators the ability to view and manage features of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud computing platform from within Rock, including the ability to schedule and automate scaling of the Azure SQL Database Service.

Azure SQL Database Service Scaling

The Azure Management plugin supports manual scaling or automatic scaling on a weekly schedule.

After installing the plugin, navigate to Admin Tools > Installed Plugins > Azure Management.

Configuring Notifications

The Azure Management plugin will send two kinds of notification emails when a scaling attempt occurs.  You will find the templates for these notification emails under Admin Tools > Communications > System Communications.  Your first step to enable notifications should be to configure these templates, including setting a “from” address.

Information Notifications

If the scaling attempt is successful, an information notification will be sent to inform you that the process succeeded.  You can modify the recipient list for this notification on the Azure Management configuration page (Admin Tools > Installed Plugins > Azure Management).  If you wish to configure details of the email generated by this notification you can do so by modifying the “Azure DB Scaling Information” System Communication template.

Warning Notifications

If a scaling attempt does not succeed within a specified time limit, the Azure Management plugin will send a warning notification.  This notification may mean that the scaling request failed and manual intervention may be required.  You can modify the time limit for manual scaling requests by configuring the block settings on the Azure Management Configuration block.  For automated scaling requests, this setting is found on the Azure Management Job, which is found by navigating to Admin Tools > System Settings > Jobs Administration.

The recipient list is in the same place as the information notification recipients, on the Azure Management configuration page (Admin Tools > Installed Plugins > Azure Management).  Details of the email message can be configured by modifying the “Azure DB Scaling Warning” System Communication template.

Manual Scaling

To manually change the service tier of your Azure SQL Database service, navigate to Admin Tools > Installed Plugins > Azure Management and select the “Manually Scale” button on the top right section of the page.

Automated Scaling

If you wish to automatically increase or decrease the service tier of your Azure SQL Database Service, navigate to Admin Tools > Installed Plugins > Azure Management and change the toggle value labeled “Scaling Automations” to “Enabled”.

When you enable Scaling Automations, you will see scheduling options, like those below, and you can add an automatic scaling adjustment at any time for any day of the week.  For example, this is what the scheduling options might look like if you wanted to increase your database processing capabilities for specific time windows on Sunday but scale the database back down for the rest of the week.

Notes About Request Timing and Scheduling

The automated scaling requests you configure are executed by the Azure Management Job, which is found by navigating to Admin Tools > System Settings > Jobs Administration.  By default, this job runs every 10 minutes, and this means your scaling requests could be delayed by as much as ten minutes.  If you require more precise timing, you can change the scheduling of this job.

The job will always attempt to scale to the last level specified in your scheduling options.  This can conflict with manual scaling.  If you have manually changed your Azure SQL Database service to a different service tier, the automated job will try to set it to the service tier you scheduled the next time it runs.