asp.net - Find changes in cloud service configuration screen

Question

I've cloud service and if you go to the azure portal and click on cloud services ->choose service -> click on configure . you see the setting which you put in VS cloud service mvc project like following:

This configure settings was configured and deployod from the cloud service in VS when you click on cloud service click on your MVC project and click on specific role and than you have screen of cofigure /settings /endpoints etc ,and you put the setting like key val in the setting view.

when you deploy your service to azure you see it in the config section in the portal like I mentiond abve...

User can change this config setting values in the portal I want to track it,If I go the the managment services I can see all the changes in the azure cloud service (caller id ,operation ID etc and there is option to see detailes but this is not sufficent) ,I want to see which property was changed and the old values, How should I do that ?

I've read the following but not find how to do that...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn186185.aspx

I guess I need to do it by code so any example will be very helpful!

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's no straight forward way to accomplish this. One thing obviously you should do is implement proper control mechanisms so that users are not making these kind of changes through the portal so that you can keep a tab on the changes (may be in your version control system).

Azure Service Management API provides a functionality which allows you to take a backup of the deployed package (cspkg and cscfg files) in blob storage. This operation is called Get Package.

What you could do is periodically invoke this operation and get a copy of the files in blob storage. Then at any given point of time, you could just call Get Deployment operation on your deployment which will return you the current configuration setting (in Configuration element, you will have to base64 decode it). You can just then compare these settings with the configuration file in blob storage.