When Azure Load Balancers route traffic to your application, you can generally expect a steady stream of requests to your load balancers. Blue Matador watches the ByteCount metric for the number of bytes going in and out of your load balancer and creates events when this metric is anomalous. A change in the number of bytes processed can be caused by two things:
- Request rate has increased/decreased
- Request or response sizes have increased/decreased
Neither of these two situations are guaranteed problems. However, it can be useful to know when your load balancer spikes or drops in traffic, especially if it happens in a pattern you were previously unaware of. Knowing about anomalous traffic can also be useful for correlation for other infrastructure issues you’re experiencing.
If you determine that the difference in bytes processed is significant, check the access logs for your load balancer. Unfortunately, Azure currently only supports logs for Basic Load Balancers. If you’re using a Standard Load Balancer, you will have to check the logs emitted by your application itself.
