Monitoring and updating statistics about data across a system is one of the crucial parts of the Microsoft Azure DP-203 exam. Being proficient in this area means understanding and controlling data flow, ensuring data quality and consistency, and making valuable data insights. Let’s dive in to explore more.
Monitoring Data Across a System
Monitoring data across a system involves checking and controlling data input, in-transit, and output, and is typically an automatable process in a well-designed data infrastructure. This enables real-time or near real-time insights on the health, performance, and operation status of your data systems.
Azure provides several tools designed explicitly for monitoring data across your system:
- Azure Monitor: Provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities across apps, network, storage, and virtual machines. It gives you insights into your applications’ performance and reliability.
- Log Analytics: Offers advanced search and querying capabilities to understand large volumes of data generated by resources and applications.
- Azure Service Health: Keeps you informed about any Azure service issues affecting your resources.
Updating Statistics about Data
Updating statistics about data in a system is vital to maintain the precision and reliability of data. The statistics about the data in your system play a crucial role in the performance of your data queries and analysis.
In Microsoft Azure, updating statistics is generally achieved through SQL Server’s “UPDATE STATISTICS” command. The statistical information collected by the “UPDATE STATISTICS” command includes the distribution of the key values in the index or column data. This distribution might change as the data distribution changes in the tables.
The command Syntax looks like this:
UPDATE STATISTICS table_or_indexed_view_name
[
{
{ index_or_statistics_name
[
{ FULLSCAN
| SAMPLE number { PERCENT | ROWS }
| RESAMPLE
}
[ [ , ] NORECOMPUTE ]
]
}
| ( { index_or_statistics_name } [ ,…n ] )
}
]
[ WITH FULLSCAN ]
[ [ , ] [ ALL | COLUMNS | INDEX ]
]
The Nexus of Monitoring and Updating
Monitoring and updating are interconnected and work in unison. When a system is properly monitored, anomalies or variances from expected values are promptly noted. Historical performance and behavior data allow predictive analytics predicting possible future system challenges or anomalies.
Concurrently, updating statistics ensures the system’s statistical models reflect the most current data. This adds to the accuracy and relevancy of predictive insights. Azure SQL Database provides an automatic tuning option for updating statistics. This feature identifies whenever the existing statistics become stale and no longer represent the data distribution, then automatically updates those statistics.
The success in DP-203 Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure exam and real-world applications requires mastery of these two areas. By learning how to effectively monitor and update statistics across Microsoft Azure’s data system, you’ll become a much more skilled and sought-after data engineer.
Practice Test
True or False: Azure Data Explorer allows you to view and monitor data statistics across a system.
- True
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Data Explorer is a service from Microsoft Azure that simplifies large-scale data exploration. It allows users to monitor and update statistics about data across a system.
The Azure Synapse Analytics service can be used to monitor and update statistics about data across a system.
- True
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Synapse Analytics is a powerful analytics service, which provides integrated and comprehensive management of data statistics across a system, making it much easier to monitor and update.
Azure Monitor can be used to collect, analyze, visualize and ultimately act on telemetry from your Azure resources.
- True
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Monitor maximizes the availability and performance of applications by delivering a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and on-premises environments.
Multiple select: Which of the following can be used to monitor and update statistics about data across a system in Microsoft Azure?
- a. Azure Synapse Analytics
- b. Azure Data table
- c. Azure Data Explorer
- d. Azure Storage Account
Answer: a, c
Explanation: Both Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Explorer can be used to monitor and update statistics across a data system in Microsoft Azure.
Single select: What is the main role of Azure Log Analytics?
- a. Store data in tables
- b. Collect and analyze log data
- c. Analyze data within SQL Server
- d. Build machine learning models
Answer: b. Collect and analyze log data
Explanation: Azure Log Analytics, a feature of Azure Monitor, is a service that helps collect and analyze data generated by resources in your Azure and on-premises environments.
True or false: It is unnecessary to update statistics in Microsoft Azure since it happens automatically.
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: While certain performance tuning measures may occur automatically in Azure, updating statistics is a crucial task that requires user intervention.
Multiple select: Which of the following are purposes served by Azure Data Factory?
- a. Data integration
- b. Data monitoring
- c. Data statistic updates
- d. All of the above
Answer: d. All of the above
Explanation: Azure Data Factory is a hybrid data integration service that allows you to create, schedule, and orchestrate data workflows. It serves multiple purposes including data integration, monitoring and updating statistics.
True or False: Azure Log Analytics can be used to monitor data across a system but not for updating any data statistics.
- True
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure Log Analytics is used for comprehensive log management and analysis. While it is good for monitoring data across a system, it is not meant for updating data statistics.
Single select: What is the purpose of the automatic tuning feature in Azure SQL database?
- a. Provides AI capabilities
- b. Automatically updates data statistics
- c. Helps maintain application performance
- d. All of the above
Answer: d. All of the above
Explanation: The automatic tuning feature in Azure SQL Database uses AI to provide peak performance and ensure that statistics are up-to-date, helping to maintain application performance.
True or False: Azure Data Factory is only used for extracting and loading large amounts of data and cannot manage statistics.
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based ETL and data integration service which also provides data monitoring and statistics management capabilities.
Interview Questions
What Azure service is often used to monitor and update statistics across a system?
Azure Monitor is typically used to track performance statistics, activity patterns, and operations trends.
What type of data does Azure Monitor collect to provide visualizations and insights?
Azure Monitor collects two types of data, Metrics and Logs. Metrics are numerical data that describes a particular aspect of a system at a specific point in time, while Logs contain different types of data organized into records with properties for each set.
What Azure tool can you use to configure alerts based on data in Azure Monitor?
The Azure Portal or the Azure Monitor API can be used to configure alerts based on data in Azure Monitor.
What is the role of Log Analytics in Azure Monitor?
Log Analytics serves as a service in Azure Monitor that helps you collect and analyze data generated by resources in your cloud and on-premises environments.
What is Application Insights in reference to Azure Monitor?
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service in Azure Monitor, designed for developers to monitor live applications, spot performance bottlenecks, and understand what users do with their apps.
Which resources can you monitor in Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor can monitor resources such as Azure virtual machines (VMs), Azure SQL Databases, and guest operating systems.
How can you enable Azure Monitor for your virtual machines (VMs)?
You can enable Azure Monitor for VMs by first selecting a workspace for the VM insights data and then enabling the insights which automatically creates the required dependencies.
What services does Azure Monitor integrate with?
Azure Monitor integrates with several services like Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Microsoft Power Automate, and third-party ITSM tools to monitor alerts and take automatic action.
Can Azure Monitor be used to monitor on-premises environments?
Yes, Azure Monitor can be extended to monitor on-premises environments by installing agents which send data to a Log Analytics workspace.
What is the role of Azure Service Health in Azure Monitor?
Azure Service Health provides personalized alerts and guidance when Azure service issues affect your resources. It delivers detailed problem analysis and helps to understand the impact of issues.
Which machine learning capabilities does Azure Monitor have?
Azure Monitor has machine learning capabilities that detect and visualize metric behavior by automatically identifying patterns in the metric data.
What Azure service is used to automate the response to Azure Monitor alerts?
Azure Logic Apps is typically used to automate the response to Azure Monitor alerts.
Can you integrate Azure Monitor with third-party services?
Yes, Azure Monitor can be integrated with popular third-party services through its REST API.
How can you use Azure Monitor to optimize the performance of your applications?
Azure Monitor provides detailed performance and application dependency data that can be used to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize the performance of applications.
What areas are covered by Azure Resource Health?
Azure Resource Health provides information about the current and past health of your resources. It will give details on events that impact the availability of your resources, whether due to Azure service issues or platform updates.
extutorials.com