How to track who is accessing your blob content

In this post we’ll talk about how we can monitor our blobs from Windows Azure.
When hosting content on a storage one of the most commune request that is coming from clients is

• How I can monitor each request that is coming to my storage?
• For them it is very important to know 
• Who downloaded the content?
• When the content was downloaded?
• How the request ended (with success)?

I saw different solution for this problem. Usually the solutions involve services that are called by the client after the download ends. It is not nothing wrong to have a service for confirmation, but you add another service that you need to maintain. Also it will be pretty hard to identify why a specific device cannot download your content.
In this moment, Windows Azure has a build-in feature that give us the possibility to track all the requests that are made to the storage. In this way you will be able to provide all the information related to the download process.
Monitor
In Windows Azure portal you will need to go to your storage and navigate to the Monitoring section. For blobs you will need to set the monitoring level to Verbose. Having the monitoring level to Verbose all metrics related to your storage will be persisted. The main different between Minimal and Verbose is the level of monitoring.
This data can be persisted from 1 day to 1 year. Based on your needs and how often you collect the data you can set the best value that suites you. If your storage is used very often I recommend to set maximum 7 days. You can define a simple process that extract monitor information from the last 7 days, store it in a different location and analyze it using your own rules. For example you may way want to raise an alert to your admins if a request coming from the same source failed for more than 10 times.
This table contains all the monitoring information for your storage. In this moment we don’t have support to write monitoring data for a specific blob to a specific table, but we can make query over this table and select only the information that we need.
All the information related to this will be persisted in Azure table from your storage named ‘$MetricsCapacityBlob’.
Logging
The feature that we really need is logging. Using logging functionality we will be able to trace all request history. The activation of this feature can be done from the portal, under the logging section. You can activate logging for the main 3 operations that can be made over a blob: Read/Write/Delete.
All this data is stored under the $logs container:
https://<accountname>.blob.core.windows.net/$logs/blob/YYYY/MM/DD/hhm/counter.log
Everything that we can imagine can be found in this table:

• Successful and failed requests with or without Shared Access Signature
• Server errors
• Timeouts errors
• Authorization, network, throttling errors
• ...

Each entity from the table contains helpful information like:

• LogType (write, read, delete)
• StartTime 
• EndTime
• LogVersion (for future, in this moment we have only one version – 1.0)
• Request URL
• Client IP
• …

The most useful information for is usually found under the ‘Client IP’ and ‘Request URL’. Maybe you ask yourself why we have a start time and an end time. This can be very useful for a read request for example. In this way we will be able to know how long the download process took.

I invite you to explore this feature when you need to track the clients that access your blob resources.