Azure Refiner Troubleshooting and Recovery

Azure Refiner Troubleshooting and Recovery can be a daunting task, but understanding the common issues and their solutions can make all the difference. A common problem with Azure Refiner is the "Refiner is not responding" error, which can occur due to a misconfigured pipeline.

To resolve this issue, you can try restarting the pipeline. This simple step can often resolve the problem and get your Azure Refiner up and running again.

Another common issue is the "Refiner is not processing data" error, which can be caused by a lack of permissions. Make sure that the Azure Refiner service account has the necessary permissions to access the data it needs to process.

By understanding these common issues and their solutions, you can quickly identify and resolve problems with your Azure Refiner. This will save you time and frustration in the long run.

Azure Refiner Settings are designed to optimize data processing and storage costs. By default, Warehouse Append is turned on, which appends incoming Event Stream data to existing data in your warehouse.

This setting helps achieve faster data syncs while reducing warehouse costs, but may increase duplicates if existing data is older than two weeks. I've seen this happen when SDKs retry sending events in case of failures, resulting in duplicate data.

To avoid duplication, you can toggle on the Merge strategy, which ensures deduplication but can lead to longer sync times and increased warehouse costs. Alternatively, you can skip sending events to certain tables, such as the users table by toggling on Skip User Table.

Here are some settings to consider:

Advanced settings are where you can fine-tune your Azure Refiner settings to suit your specific needs.

Warehouse Append is a setting that's turned on by default, and it helps achieve faster data syncs while reducing warehouse costs. However, it may increase the number of duplicates in the warehouse, especially if the existing data is older than two weeks.

A merge strategy ensures deduplication but can lead to longer sync times and increased warehouse costs. This is why you might want to consider disabling the Warehouse Append setting if you prioritize deduplication.

By disabling Warehouse Append, you can prevent duplication, but you might experience slower data syncs and higher warehouse costs. It's a trade-off that depends on your specific requirements.

Here are some advanced settings you can toggle on or off:

These settings can help you optimize your data syncs and warehouse costs, but make sure you understand the implications before making any changes.

Here's the two answers you've been looking for:

You can choose between two types of refiner settings in Azure: Azure Refiner and Azure Refiner (Preview).

The Azure Refiner provides a simple and easy-to-use interface for refining data, while the Azure Refiner (Preview) offers more advanced features and capabilities.

Cloud Rewind offers advanced recovery options, including recovering a scale set without instances, which can be done manually or through Cloud Rewind webhooks.

Recovering a scale set without instances is a good option, as it retains most service private IPs during recovery, but be aware that recovering other services with scale sets may cause static IP loss.

To prevent static IP loss, you can enable 'Recover Scale Set with Zero Instances', which is a safer option.

Cloud Rewind also allows you to enable VNet mapping, which gives you control over mapping your recovery VNet and subnet.

By enabling VNet mapping, you can choose a custom recovery VNet that already exists in your Azure account.

Retaining private IP range is another option, which allows Cloud Rewind to retain all the same source private IPs in the recovered resource.

However, if you enable "Retain Private IP" along with custom VNet recovery, the recovery VNet CIDR needs to be the same as the source VNet.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when it comes to data retrieval and recovery:

Azure Refiner provides three recovery scenarios for data loss: accidental deletion, data corruption, and data loss due to hardware failure.

In the event of accidental deletion, Azure Refiner can recover data from the latest checkpoint, which is automatically created every 5 minutes. This ensures that even if data is deleted by mistake, it can be recovered quickly and easily.

Data corruption can occur due to various reasons, such as software bugs or hardware issues. Azure Refiner can detect and repair corrupted data, ensuring that it remains consistent and accurate.

Azure Refiner's ability to recover data from corrupted files is particularly useful in scenarios where data is being written to a storage device with a high error rate, such as in a data center with failing hard drives.

You can recover your scale set without instances by enabling the "Recover scale set without instances" option. This will allow you to scale up manually or through Cloud Rewind webhooks once the recovery is complete.

Cloud Rewind retains most service private IPs during recovery, but recovering other services with scale sets may cause static IP loss. To prevent this, enable 'Recover Scale Set with Zero Instances'.

Enabling "Enable VNet mapping" gives you the capability of choosing a custom recovery VNet that already exists in your Azure account. This feature allows you to have control over mapping your recovery VNet and subnet.

Retaining Private IP Range is also an option, which retains all the same source private IPs in the recovered resource. This is particularly useful when using custom VNet recovery.

If you enable "Retain Private IP" along with custom VNet recovery, the recovery VNet CIDR needs to be the same as the source VNet. This is an important consideration to keep in mind.

Cloud Rewind also offers the option to "Override Resource Dependencies", which is available only for same VNet recovery. This option allows you to recover only VMs and VM Scale Sets, overriding other dependencies like Load Balancers, Application Gateways, and Network Security Groups with the backup configuration.

You can also select specific resource groups to recover. For SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL Servers, only 'Same-Region' & 'Same-Resource group' selected resource recovery is supported.

Here are some key limitations to keep in mind:

Same Region Recovery is a powerful feature that allows you to recover your protected resources to the same region.

You can recover the entire assembly or specific resource groups using Cloud Rewind, giving you flexibility and control over the recovery process.

Using specific resource group recovery, you can recover specific resources within a selected resource group, and they will be restored to their source VNet only.

To recover to an existing VNet, you need to select the VNet mapping option available under "Advanced Options" and map the source VNet to an equivalent recovery VNet.

Make sure the recovery VNet has the same number of subnets and IPs per subnet as the source VNet to avoid recovery failures.

If the above options are not enabled, Cloud Rewind will recover all protected resources to a new clone VNet created by Cloud Rewind.

You can also recover to a new VNet, which is isolated and created by Cloud Rewind using the same source VPC private configuration.