Creating an Extended Events session (as well as viewing events) in Azure SQL Database is slightly different than a typical SQL Server. Since you don’t have access to the file system of the server where your database live, you need to configure a storage account target for persistence of your extended event sessions. You can write them to the ring buffer, but since you do not have the ability to “view live events” in SQL Server Management Studio, this is of limited benefit. You read about what you need to do in docs here, but in a nutshell it’s create a storage account (or use an existing one) create a database scoped credential so you can use the storage account, and then create the xEvents session.
The reason why I’m writing this post is that there is a bit of a bug here that’s not fully documented. Many of us (especially those of us who are consultants) work across the scope of Azure Active Directory tenants. What that means is joeyd@dcac.com might manage a database in the contoso.com Azure AD tenant while still being logged in with the joeyd@dcac.com identity. Normally, this isn’t an issue but there are a couple of places where some odd things happen with cross-tenancy. When you try to create a credential in your database, you will receive the following error, even if you are the database owner.
Started executing query at Line 1
Msg 2760, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
The specified schema name "joeyd@dcac.com" either does not exist or you do not have permission to use it.
Total execution time: 00:00:00.195
You should note the rapid execution time of that error–this isn’t failing when going out to a storage account to validate the credential, the code is failing in the database. I posted something about this to the Microsoft MVP DL and the ever brilliant Simon Sabin emailed me and suggested that I try to create a schema called joeyd@dcac.com and then create the credential. Sure enough–that worked fine and I could proceed. In the customer system where this happened, we were fortunate enough to have global admin rights in AAD, and just created a new user in their subscription, and used it.
