A solution in Azure Compute that reduces virtual machine downtime through automated recovery processes. Available across all Azure for all virtual machines (VM), no configuration required.
Co-authors: Mukhtar Ahmed, Shekhar Agrawal, Harish Luckshetty, Vinay Nagarajan, Jie Su, Sri Harsha Kanukuntla, David Maldonado, Shardul Dabholkar.
Keeping virtual machines running smoothly is essential for businesses across every industry. When a VM stays down for even a short period, the impact can cascade quickly; delayed financial transactions, stalled manufacturing lines, unavailable retail systems, or interruptions to healthcare services. This understanding led to the creation of this solution, with its primary goal of ensuring fast and reliable recovery times so customers can focus on their business priorities without worrying about manual recovery strategies. This feature helps ensure your business Service-Level Agreements are consistently met.
When a VM experiences an issue, our system springs into action within seconds, working to restore your service as quickly as possible. It automatically executes the optimal recovery strategy, all without customer intervention. The feature operates continuously in the background, monitoring the health of VMs through multiple detection mechanisms. Lastly, it automatically selects the fastest recovery path based on the specific failure type.
Getting Started
The best part? Azure Automated VM Recovery requires no setup or configuration. Running quietly in the background, this service helps guarantee the highest level of recoverability and a smooth experience for every Azure customer. Your VMs are already benefiting from faster detection, smarter diagnosis, and optimized recovery strategies.
The Importance of Automated VM Recovery
Automated VM recovery is essential to keeping cloud services resilient, reliable, and interruption-free. Automated recovery ensures that the moment a failure occurs, the platform responds instantly with fast detection, intelligent diagnostics, and the optimal repair action, all without requiring customer intervention.
- Better experience for customers: By minimizing VM downtime, it helps customers keep their services online, avoiding disruptions and potential business losses.
- Stronger trust in Azure: Fast, reliable recovery builds customer confidence in Azure’s platform, reinforcing our reputation for dependability.
- Reduced financial impact for customers: The lower the downtime, the less time your customers will be impacted, reducing potential loss of revenue and minimizing business disruption during critical operations.
- Empowering internal teams: Automated monitoring and clear visibility into recovery metrics help teams track health, onboard easily, and identify opportunities for improvement with minimal effort.
How Azure Automated VM Recovery Works: A Three-Stage Approach
Azure automatically handles VM issues through a three-stage recovery framework: Detection, Diagnosis, and Mitigation.
- Detection
From the moment a failure occurs, multiple parallel mechanisms identify issues quickly. Azure hardware devices send regular health signals, which are monitored for interruptions or degradation. At the application level, operational health is tracked via response times, error rates, and successful operations to detect software-level problems rapidly.
- Diagnosis
Once detected, lightweight diagnostics determine the best recovery action without unnecessary delays. Diagnostics operates at multiple levels; host level checks asses underlying infrastructure, VM level diagnostics evaluate the virtual machine state and system-on-chip (SoC) level analysis examines hardware components. This includes network checks, resource utilization assessments, and service responsiveness tests. Detailed data is also collected for post-incident analysis, continuously improving diagnostic algorithms while active recovery proceeds.
- Mitigation
Based on diagnostics, the system automatically executes the optimal recovery strategy, starting with the least disruptive methods and escalating as needed. Hardware failures may trigger VM migration, while software issues might be resolved with targeted service restarts. If needed, a host reset is performed while preserving virtual machine state, ensuring minimal disruption to running workloads. Post-mitigation health checks ensure full VM functionality before recovery is considered complete.
Recovery Event Annotations
Recovery Event Annotations are specialized annotations that provide detailed visibility into every stage of VM recovery, going beyond simple uptime metrics. These indicators act as custom monitoring metrics, breaking down each incident into precise time segments. For example, TTD (Time to Detect) measures the time between a VM becoming unhealthy and the system recognizing the issue, while TTDiag (Time to Diagnose) tracks the duration of diagnostic checks. By analyzing these segments, Recovery Timing Indicators help identify bottlenecks, optimize recovery steps, and improve overall reliability. Key benefits include:
- Understanding why some VMs recover faster than others.
- Identifying which diagnostics add value versus those that don’t.
- Highlighting opportunities that provide a faster path of recovery.
- Enabling early detection of regressions through event annotation-driven alerts.
- Establishing a common language across Azure teams for measuring and improving downtime.
Customer Impact and Results
Azure Automated VM Recovery demonstrates our commitment to not only high availability but also rapid recovery. By minimizing downtime, it helps customers build resilient applications and maintain business continuity during unexpected failures. Over the past 18 months, this solution has cut average VM downtime by more than half, significantly enhancing reliability and customer experience. Our ongoing goal is to provide a platform where customers can deploy workloads with confidence, knowing automated recovery will minimize disruptions.
Microsoft