Who/what unpaused my Azure SQL Database?

Question

Looking at App CPU Billed measure I see that my Azure SQL database is sometime billed during non-working hours. I have set Pause to 1 hour, and there are no scheduled activity in non-working hours. However, I constantly see App CPU Billed when the database is supposed to be "sleeping". There are no queries running at that time as per screenshots.
So my question is how do I find out what/who unpauses my database?

Answer 1

Please examine Azure Defender for SQL as it runs periodic scans including vulnerability scans and the threat detection feature also can create activity. Those are usually the culprit in my experience.

Other possible conditions that can trigger auto-resume are explained here.

Answer 2

Azure Defender for SQL and Automatic Tuning are disabled for this database.

Answer 3

Hi @Tautvydas Perminas Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Q&A and for using Azure services.
My understanding is that you are seeing App CPU billed even though database was paused.

**How do I find out what/who unpauses my database? **

The following features do not support auto-pausing but do support auto-scaling. If any of the following features are used, then auto-pausing must be disabled, and the database will remain online regardless of the duration of database inactivity:

• Geo-replication (active geo-replication and auto-failover groups).
• Long-term backup retention (LTR).
• The sync database used in SQL Data Sync. Unlike sync databases, hub and member databases support auto-pausing.
• DNS alias created for the logical server containing a serverless database.
• Elastic Jobs (preview), when the job database is a serverless database. Databases targeted by elastic jobs support auto-pausing and will be resumed by job connections.

Auto-pausing is temporarily prevented during the deployment of some service updates which require the database be online. In such cases, auto-pausing becomes allowed again once the service update completes.

Auto-pause troubleshooting
If auto-pausing is enabled, but a database does not auto-pause after the delay period, and the features listed above are not used, the application or user sessions may be preventing auto-pausing. To see if there are any application or user sessions currently connected to the database, connect to the database using any client tool, and execute the following query:

SELECT session_id,
host_name,
program_name,
client_interface_name,
login_name,
status,
login_time,
last_request_start_time,
last_request_end_time
FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions AS s
INNER JOIN sys.dm_resource_governor_workload_groups AS wg
ON s.group_id = wg.group_id
WHERE s.session_id <> @@SPID
AND
(
(
wg.name like 'UserPrimaryGroup.DB%'
AND
TRY_CAST(RIGHT(wg.name, LEN(wg.name) - LEN('UserPrimaryGroup.DB') - 2) AS int) = DB_ID()
)
OR
wg.name = 'DACGroup'
);

Source: Azure SQL Database serverless

Regards,
Oury