The Azure Management Portals (old and new one) have been lacking an important feature ever since the availability of Windows Azure. There was no audit trail available for actions performed by application managers in the Azure Management Portal. From a business and continuity point of view this is unacceptable. But now there’s good news…
The good news
Scott Guthrie recently posted a blog that mentioned the availability of Operation Logs. To access the Operation Logs one must first log on to the Azure Management Portal. The Operation Logs can be found in the Settings section at the lower left of the Management Portal.
Select the Operation Logs at the top of the page and by default a period is selected of 1 day. Using the fields another period and other subscriptions can be selected. The table contains operation log entries.
Selecting a specific operation log entry and then clicking the Details button at the bottom of the page shows all details of that entry.
The email address related to the LiveID of the operator that performed the action is logged as well as the originating IP address, operation type and other details.
The bad news
Operation Logs is a must-have feature to be able to deliver good maintenance to customers. Although the audit trail is present now it is still limited to only log actions regarding Cloud Services and Azure Storage. Actions on all other Azure goodies like SQL Azure databases, IaaS, Windows Azure Web Sites, etc. is not yet supported.
