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“The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your hosted services and storage accounts in Windows Azure.”
Based on the provided information, the MMC plug-in provides capabilities to remotely manage your Hosted Services, Storage Services, Blob Storage, Queues and Tables. It also provides a way to manage your certificates that are associated with your services.
It was recently published by Ryan Dunn from Microsoft.
The interface is still crude and built on top of the Azure Power-Shell Backend. That may be disappointing if you expected a full flesh systems management tooling with all the nice parts, but is actually very good news because it means that (at least in theory) anybody can build a ‘decent’ interface to the exposed API.
What I found impressive is the hook into the Azure diagnostics capabilities and work with a variety of diagnostic data. The data is downloadable so make sure you define the correct set in order to mistakenly download gigabytes of information.
Also interesting is the fact that access to the viewers (of the diagnostic data) is based on MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) so you can build your own set of viewers and add them to the MMC interface.
The information page contains a 15-min screen-cast, introducing the capabilities. Ryan also has a blog entry on this MMC.
The full set of features (I copied this from his blog entry):
| Hosted Services |
Upload / configure / control / upgrade / swap / remove Windows Azure application deployments |
| Diagnostics | Configure instrumentation for Windows Azure applications (diagnostics) per source (perf counters, file based, app logs, infrastructure logs, event logs). Transfer the diagnostic data on-demand or scheduled. View / Analyze / Export to Excel and Clear instrumentation results. |
| Certificates | Upload / manage certificates for Windows Azure applications |
| Storage Services | Configure Storage Services for Windows Azure applications |
| BLOBs and Containers | Add / Upload / Download / Remove BLOBs and Containers and connect to multiple storage accounts |
| Queues | Add / Purge / Delete Windows Azure Queues |
| Tables | Query and delete Windows Azure Tables |
| Extensibility | Create plugins for rich diagnostics data visualization (e.g. add your own visualizer for performance counters). Create plugins for table viewers and editors or add completely new modules! Plug-in Engine uses MEF (extensibility framework) to easily add functionality. |
| PowerShell-based backend | The backend is based on PowerShell cmdlets. If you don’t like our UI, you can still use the underlying cmdlets and script out anything we do. |
(Table content by Ryan Dunn, published on may 10, 2010. Source: dunnry.com/blog/)
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