Azure is not responding and/or busy, now what?

We have been experiencing some intermittent Windows Azure issues with our https://data.stackexchange.com

Essentially this is what is happening:

1. We deploy it
2. Everything works fine for a few days
3. The server starts playing up and will flip from "busy" to "unresponsive"
4. Sometimes it comes out of state (3) after a few hours / days and resumes normal operations

How would I go about figuring the root cause for this issue?

1. Is there some internal log that can show me why Azure thinks the server is non responsive
2. Is there a way for me to force a recycle if we detect this is going on
3. Are there any perfmon or perfmon like counters I can look at to monitor the health of the deployment

Just to you for information, if you go to this page http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/support/status/servicedashboard.aspx you can see the status of all Azure datacenters and services, if you think Azure not "works" as expected, you can check this out to see if there is any issues around the "Azure world"

Related to your other questions there is some Diagnostics monitor stuff you can set on your Azure Service, and from there transfer the logs to Azure storage account and check them out there.

Check out Windows Azure MMC snap-in to connect to Azure and set up diagnostics and analysis.

I work on the Windows Azure team. Apart from the dashboard and intellitrace, I suggest you call/message support. They are pretty good at telling you what is going on very quickly