An essential aspect of using cloud services is ensuring availability and performance. Outages or performance problems have a significant impact on today’s business processes and lost revenue, image damage and angry customers.
Azure Service Health is a free service from Microsoft Azure. The service provides real-time information in a dashboard about the status and performance of Azure services. The service continuously monitors resources and proactively informs about service problems.
Azure Service Health provides information in the following categories:
- Service issues
Notifications about unexpected outages of Azure services or resources in a specific region. - Planned maintenance
Information about planned maintenance that may have an impact on services, resources and their performance. - Health advisories
Information about upcoming changes to Azure services that need attention. (e.g. mandatory upgrade requirements). - Security advisories
Best practice for configuring Azure services secure.
Prerequisites and Licensing
In order to use Azure Service Health, the following prerequisites must be met:
- an active Azure Subscription
- Active resources are available in the Azure subscription
- To view Azure Service Health messages, users must have the Reader role granted on the Azure subscription
- An action group is required to receive Azure Service Health Alerts (Azure Monitor action groups – Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn)
Azure Service Health Dashboard
The Azure Service Health dashboard is located in the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com)
In the All services menu, under the category General, select the Service Health resource.
Service issues
The Service issues view shows current service problems.
In the event of a service outage, detailed information and potential impact on resources is displayed here.
At the time of writing this post, no service outage has been reported, so no screenshot is available for the detailed information.
Planned maintenance
The Planned maintenance view provides early information about future maintenance work and its potential impact on resources.
Health advisories
Health advisories include indications of impending problems or outages of services and resources. Health advisories include best practices to be able to react early to impending problems or failures.
Security advisories
Security advisories in Azure Service Health are based on security best practices and current knowledge of cybersecurity. Security advisories cover the following services and resources:
- Identity protection
- Network security
- Data security
- Security updates
- Threat detection
- Threat defence
- Compliance
Set up Service Health Warnings
Service Health alerts via email are configured in the Service Health Dashboard.
Health alerts > Add service health alert
Select the Subscription in the Scope tab. For several subscriptions, several rules must be created.
In the Condition tab, select the conditions that will result in a warning email.
Best practice, it has proven useful to select all services and regions here. This ensures that current resources and resources created in the future are automatically monitored.
Warnings are only sent from resources that are actually used in the selected subscription.
In the Action tab, select the action group that will receive the warnings.
The action groups are based on the well-known Azure Monitor Action Groups. Further information can be found here:
Azure Monitor action groups – Azure Monitor | Microsoft Learn
An existing action group can be selected or a new action group can be created.
In the Details tab, specify in which subscription and resource group the rule is saved.
- Select subscription and resource group
- Name for alerting rule
Specify Tags according to own guidelines.
Check configuration again and create with Create.
The alert rule is shown after a short time under Health alerts.
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