Application Insights Sampling

Question

I have been reading Application Insights documentation but I still have some doubts and would like to ask following questions regarding sampling in application insights:

We're using Azure File Shares with the Storage Sync Service linking them to Windows file servers and Cloud Tiering enabled to keep the disk usage on the servers down. For reason we get massively different access speeds for files that haven't been cached on Mac and Windows clients.

Users on a Windows client will get access to the file in about the time you'd expect it to take for the Server Endpoint to download the file from Azure and present it to a client. The main bottleneck looks like end to end network bandwidth across the full transfer path and it tends to hit a fairly high percentage of whatever the slowest connection is along they way, whether that's the internet link between the file server and Azure, the Wi-Fi connectivity the client has to the server, or the client internet bandwidth if they're on the end of a VPN link. So it's fairly variable, but can easily hit 100s of Mbps.

Mac clients on the other hand are lucky to hit 100s of Kbps when trying to open files that aren't cached on the Server Endpoint. We've not had any success in working out why, everything on the Windows/Azure side looks OK, but we're not quite so confident on the Mac side, any suggestions on where to look?

Answer 1

@JialiYangDEVREL Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

It seems like the issue is with the Mac clients not being able to access the Azure File Shares at high speeds. This could be due to a number of reasons, such as network connectivity issues, client-side caching, or differences in the SMB protocol implementation between Windows and Mac clients.

To troubleshoot this issue, you can try the following steps:

1. Verify that the Mac clients have good network connectivity to the Azure File Shares. You can use the ping and traceroute tools to check the network latency and hop count between the Mac clients and the Azure File Shares.
2. Check if the Mac clients are using the latest version of the SMB protocol (SMB 3.1.1) to access the Azure File Shares. You can use the smbutil statshares command to check the SMB protocol version used by the Mac clients.
3. Check if the Mac clients are using client-side caching to access the Azure File Shares. You can use the smbutil statshares -c command to check if the Mac clients are using client-side caching.
4. If the Mac clients are using client-side caching, you can try disabling it to see if that improves the access speeds. You can use the smbutil statshares -c off command to disable client-side caching on the Mac clients.
5. If the issue persists, you can try using the Azure Files REST API to access the Azure File Shares from the Mac clients. The Azure Files REST API uses the HTTP/HTTPS protocol, which is supported by most operating systems, including MacOS.
6. If the issue still persists, you can try using a network sniffer tool, such as Wireshark, to capture the network traffic between the Mac clients and the Azure File Shares. This can help you identify any network-related issues that might be causing the slow access speeds.

I hope these steps help you troubleshoot the issue with the Mac clients accessing the Azure File Shares. Let me know if you need any further assistance. Thank you!

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Answer 2