Change the retention days of the logs from the Management Portal for a Cloud Service (PAAS)
While testing a project for which I had configured diagnostics, I found that whenever I tried to change the Retention Days it just refreshes, no matter which browser I used. Irrespective of the fact whether I choose Minimal or Verbose it just redirected to the Monitoring page.
From MSDN I found the following
If you have not enabled Windows Azure Diagnostics for the cloud service, the Level option is not available. You can't change the data retention policy. Verbose monitoring data for a cloud service is stored for 10 days.
Article : https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-how-to-monitor/
I tried it on multiple browsers without luck.
On inspecting the element we find the following. It’s textbox which is set to “readonly” but not greyed out and has "Enter an integer value between 0 and 90.” It also has minimum and maximum value validation.
Based on the above I thought I was still not doing it correctly. So I followed the steps in the MSDN article again to enable diagnostics. I did it using Visual Studio 2012 as illustrated in
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn186185.aspx
a) Using Cloudberry I verified that the IIS logs are collected for the day. We can see in the image below that for 25th Jan 2014 the logs are present. It has also been collected for the previous days.
From Visual Studio Windows
b) From Portal I am still not able to modify it. The HTML element still has readonly="readonly"
<input readonly="readonly" data-val="true" data-val-required="Enter an integer value between 0 and 90." data-val-range="Enter an integer value between 0 and 90." data-val-range-min="0" data-val-range-max="90" data-val-digits="Enter an integer value between 0 and 90." data-fxcontrol-auto-revert="true" class="hs-monitoring-retention fx-textbox fx-validation fx-editablecontrol fx-validation-required-valid fx-validation-range-valid fx-validation-digits-valid fx-validation-valid" data-automationid="hsStagingMonitoring" type="text" value="">
So I had a discussion with the Engineering team and it seems Retention field is NON-Editable (Always), its state doesn’t change based on diagnostics status. So in case you have read the verbatim incorrectly just like me and assumed that it says Retention Days can be changed if we have Diagnostics enabled then it’s an incorrect assumption. Though I still wonder what is the purpose of the tip “Enter an integer value between 0 and 90” and data validations present for.