Improved troubleshooting in Azure Stream Analytics with diagnostic logs

We are announcing the much-awaited public preview of diagnostic logs for Azure Stream Analytics through integrations with Azure Monitoring. You can now examine late or malformed data that causes unexpected behaviors. This helps remediate errors caused by data that does not conform to the expectations of the query.

Diagnostic logs provide rich insights into all operations associated with a streaming job. They are turned off by default and can be enabled in the “Diagnostic logs” blade under “Monitoring”. These are different from Activity logs that are always enabled and provide details on management operations performed.

Examples of data handling errors that diagnostic logs can help with include:

Data conversion and serialization errors in cases of schema mismatch.
Incompatible types including constraints such as allow null and duplicates.
Truncation of strings and issues with precision during conversion.
Expression evaluation errors such as divide by zero, overflow etc.

An example of non-conforming data being written to Azure storage is illustrated below:

{
Diagnostic:"Encountered error trying to write 3 events: …",
Timestamp:"7/25/2015 12:27:44Z",
Source:"Output1",
Output:"Output1",
Error:
{
Type:"System.InvalidOperationException",
Description:"The given value “hello world” of type string from the data source cannot be converted to type decimal of the specified target column [Amount].",
},
EventData:
{
SomeValue:”hello world”,
Count:1
}
}

Errors are sampled by error type and source as shown above.

Immediate access to the actual data that causes errors enables you to either quickly remediate problems or ignore the non-conforming data to make progress.

Persisting event data and operational metadata (such as occurrence time and occurrence count) in an Azure Storage artifacts enables easier diagnosis and faster troubleshooting of issues. This data can also be analyzed offline using Azure Log Analytics. Routing this data to EventHub makes it possible to set up a Stream Analytics job to monitor another Stream Analytics job!

It should be noted that the usage of services such as Azure Storage, EventHub, and Log Analytics for analyzing non-conforming data will be charged based on the pricing model for those services.

We are excited for you to try it out our diagnostic logs. Detailed steps on using this capability can be found in the documentation page.
Quelle: Azure

Google Allo Is Losing Steam In The World’s Largest Smartphone Market

Remember Allo? It’s Google’s instant messenger that uses artificial intelligence to do things like suggesting smart replies when you’re chatting with friends, and serving up restaurant suggestions if it sees you making dinner plans.

In September, Google launched Allo in India before it released it in any other country. This isn’t particularly surprising. Google’s been giving the country a lot of attention lately: Last year, it hooked up over 100 Indian railway stations to high-speed Wi-Fi and created a special app called YouTube Go especially for India.

With Allo, Google hoped to introduce Indians to a better messaging experience than the simplistic WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned app that remains the country’s most popular instant messenger. But five months in, it doesn’t seem to be working out too well.

Twitter: @juberti

According to data from app analytics firm Sensor Tower provided to BuzzFeed News, Google Allo has been downloaded 3.1 million times on the Google Play Store, and 264,000 times on the Apple App Store in India since it was launched in September 2016.

Sensor Tower

In comparison, Facebook Messenger was downloaded over 33 million times on the Play Store and 1.7 million times on iOS since Allo’s launch. WhatsApp? 58.6 million downloads on the Play Store and 3.2 million on iOS. Both Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have been downloaded around the world over 1.6 billion times each since Messenger was launched in 2014, according to Sensor Tower’s data.

Twitter: @madmanweb

Allo was Google’s reimagining of what a messaging app should be like. The company tried to make it specifically appealing to Indians by adding the Hindi language to the built-in Google Assistant, and including sticker packs designed by Indian artists in the app. But in a world saturated with instant messengers, breaking in is hard.

“It’s not entirely unexpected, and it’s not something that we lose hope or sleep over,” Amit Fulay, Group Product Manager for Google Allo, told BuzzFeed News. “You’ll see a pattern even with the most successful products: There’s a huge bump in the beginning, and then there’s a slump; and then you see the real, retentive users sticking there and getting and friends and families on board, and you see the graph going back up.”

WhatsApp dominates India with over 200 million active users, but Fulay said that despite the strong incumbent, Google still saw a lot of potential in the market. “Smartphones are often the only way most Indians access the internet and instant messaging is the primary thing most of them use these devices for,” he said. “We also thought that instant messaging is an area that’s ripe for innovation.”

Still, the combined network effects of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are tough to fight. “I don’t think we have any expectations of users in India thronging to us en masse,” said Fulay. “But this is a long game for us in some ways. We think we already have a better product [than the competition]. The next step is figuring out how to make inroads.”

To make those inroads, Google has been marketing Allo aggressively in India. In November, it worked with All India Bakchod, a popular stand up comedy group in India with over two million YouTube subscribers, to produce a YouTube comedy sketch that subtly advertised Allo features. Product placement isn’t really an uncommon concept in Indian advertising, but it’s a first for Google in India, which, thus far, has largely relied on organic growth through word of mouth and its stronghold on the country’s smartphone market through Android.

Google has also started advertising Allo in Cafe Coffee Day, a popular coffee chain around the country — actions like downloading the app, creating group chats within Allo, and asking Google Assistant for “coffee jokes” gets you a free cappuccino.

Twitter: @rajeshbhusal

Fulay says Google has concentrated its Allo marketing around India’s young demographic. “Young Indians like college students and early professionals have a greater propensity to try new apps, and they’re looking for more premium experiences,” he said. “They have a tendency to discuss new things they discover with their peers. These are the people we are focusing on [with our marketing].”

The key thing right now, he said, is to just get people to try the Allo experience. “The belief is that if people try, they will like Allo.”

Quelle: <a href="Google Allo Is Losing Steam In The World’s Largest Smartphone Market“>BuzzFeed

Azure Brings big data, analytics, and visualization capabilities to U.S. Government

To further our commitment to providing the latest in cloud innovation for government customers we’re excited to announce the general availability of HDInsight and Power BI Pro in Microsoft Cloud for Government.  HDInsight and Power BI bring exciting new capabilities to Azure Government that enable organizations to manage, analyze, and visualize large quantities of data. HDInsight unlocks the ability to build data and machine learning applications that run-on Apache Spark and Hadoop.  Power BI allows for the aggregation of data and visualization with easy to operate dashboard functionality.

We are also announcing a preview of Cognitive Services in Azure Government. We have enabled scenarios such as audio and text translation into other languages as well as facial (gender and age) and emotion recognition with Computer Vision and Emotion. If you’re interested in participating in the Azure Government Cognitive Services preview, please contact azgovfeedback@microsoft.com for more information.

With these capabilities working today, we can take data and derive insight in minutes.  Here’s a video example of these capabilities working together. In this demo, we leveraged HDInsight, Power BI and Machine Learning along with our Cognitive Services (available in preview for Azure Government) to show how you can easily build a solution to translate and analyze text and visualize the results.

Some partners are leveraging these capabilities to provide real time dashboards for their solutions, such as Prabal Acharyya, WW Director IoT Analytics for OSIsoft Technologies. OSISoft provides business solutions that connect sensor-based data, operations, and people to enable real-time intelligence for their customers. Prabal expanded on Power BI’s value, saying:

“Data scientists in U.S. Government spend inordinate amounts of time each day manually scrubbing terabytes of operational data for advanced analytics and business intelligence”, says Acharyya, “OSIsoft is pleased to partner with Microsoft to deliver PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure on Microsoft U.S. Government Cloud with free and fluid access to streaming Power BI-ready data, context & insights to build Innovative Gov solutions”

Azure HDInsight

HDInsight is the only fully-managed cloud Hadoop offering that provides optimized open source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and R Server backed by a 99.9% SLA. Each of these big data technologies and ISV applications are easily deployable as managed clusters with enterprise-level security and monitoring. 

HDInsight brings Big Data to Azure Government and broadens the landscape for building powerful data analysis solutions. Examples include:

Deploy a Big Data analysis cluster in minutes. No upfront costs, get started immediately.
Enable streaming and processing of large data sets in real time using Kafka, Storm, and Spark for HDInsight.
Build Machine Learning capabilities with Spark and R Server
Build intelligent applications that leverage big data to deliver personalized experiences

If you’re looking to get started creating powerful solutions with HDInsight for Azure Government log into the Azure Portal or signup for a trial.

Power BI Pro for U.S. Government

Power BI brings your Big Data solutions to life with live dashboards, interactive reports, and compelling visualizations. Power BI connects to a broad range of data wherever it lives and enables anyone to visualize and analyze data with greater speed, efficiency, and understanding.

Power BI Pro for Microsoft Cloud for Government includes:

Power BI service is a cloud-based business analytics service that gives you a single view of your most critical data.
Power BI Desktop puts visual analytics at your fingertips with intuitive report authoring; drag-and-drop to place content exactly where you want it on the flexible and fluid canvas, and quickly discover patterns as you explore a single unified view of linked, interactive visualizations.
Power BI Mobile helps you stay connected to your data from anywhere, anytime; and get a 360° view of your organization data on the go – at the touch of your fingertips.

Want to get started? Signup for Power BI Pro for Government
Quelle: Azure