In today's fast-paced cloud computing environment, maintaining the optimal performance and reliability of your applications is crucial. Azure Load Balancer's Health Status feature , now generally available to customers, significantly simplifies this task by providing detailed health information about your backend instances without the need to file a support ticket. This tool offers invaluable insights into the health state of each backend instance and the specific reasons behind their status, whether user-triggered or platform-triggered. By leveraging this feature, customers can proactively address issues, ensure minimal downtime, and enhance the overall user experience, all while reducing reliance on support services.
What is Health Status?
Health Status is an Azure Load Balancer feature that gives you detailed health information about the backend instances connected to your Azure Load Balancer’s backend pool. Each status is linked to your load balancing rules and provides two key insights: the health state of each backend instance and the reasoning behind its state.
The health state indicates whether your backend instance is healthy ("Up") or unhealthy ("Down"). The reasoning behind these states is explained through reason codes, which fall into two categories: User Triggered Reason Codes and Platform Triggered Reason Codes.
- User Triggered Reason Codes are based on how you configured your load balancer setup and can be addressed by you.
- Platform Triggered Reason Codes are based on the Azure Load Balancer platform and cannot be addressed by you.
For more information about the different reason codes, view our public documentation.
Why use Health Status?
In the past, customers were not provided with insights into why their backend instances were deemed healthy or unhealthy. To access this crucial information, customers often had to follow troubleshooting procedures such as taking packet captures or going through the process of creating a support ticket, relying on support engineers to identify the cause of a failed health probe. This process was not only complex and time-consuming but also incurred additional costs and added significant management overhead.
Now, with the Health Status feature, customers can easily access real-time health information of their backend instances. This empowers them to make swift and informed decisions, minimizing downtime, reducing support costs, and enhancing the overall user experience. By leveraging these insights, customers can proactively manage their environment and ensure optimal performance.
Retrieving Health Status
Health Status can be easily retrieved on a per load balancing rule basis. To retrieve Health Status:
- Sign in to the Azure Portal and search for "Load balancers".
- Select your load balancer and navigate to "Load balancing rules" under Settings.
- View the health status of the rule by clicking “View details” value of the corresponding rule. Refresh button can be used to get the latest status.
Figure 1: Sample Health Status in Azure Portal
Contoso's Utilization of Health Status for Game Server Maintenance
Let’s explore how one of our customers, Contoso, uses the Health Status feature for efficient decision-making and troubleshooting.
Who is Contoso and what is their issue
Contoso, a prominent name in the gaming industry, has been leveraging Azure Load Balancer to distribute traffic to their highly popular game server hosted on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Their users love using Contoso’s servers due to the reliability and performance achieved on them. Recently, Contoso encountered an issue where one of their game servers became unhealthy, leading to disruptions in the gaming experience for their users.
How Health Status resolved their issue
Thanks to the Azure Load Balancer Health Status feature, the Contoso team was able to quickly navigate to the Load balancing rule page in Portal to view the health status of the unhealthy virtual machine instance. By doing so, they retrieved detailed insights into why their game server was marked unhealthy. This real-time information highlighted “the backend instance was unhealthy due to Admin State set to Down”.
Armed with this crucial data, Contoso's Network team swiftly addressed the configuration issue by toggling the Admin State value of unhealthy server to “None”, thereby restoring the server to a healthy state. After a root cause analysis, it was determined that the previous engineer mistakenly toggled the wrong server to a Down Admin State value when trying to do fixes on another server.
Benefits of using Health Status
Instead of creating a support ticket and waiting for assistance, they utilized the Health Status feature to diagnose and resolve the problem independently. This proactive approach not only minimized downtime but also reduced support costs and enhanced the overall user experience.
Conclusion
By incorporating the Health Status feature into their operational workflow, Contoso has been able to make efficient, data-driven decisions and troubleshooting issues promptly, ensuring their gaming services remain robust and reliable for their users.
Get Started
We are excited to bring the Azure Load Balancer’s Health Status feature to you. This feature provides valuable insights into the health of your backend instances, helping you ensure better troubleshooting for optimal performance and reliability of your applications. For more information and to get started, visit the following links:
We hope you can take advantage of this feature, and we welcome your feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment below.
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