Platform Alerts with Azure Health Service

Margaret_Farmer

Microsoft

May 12, 2025

Stay alerted about critical service Azure outages that are crucial to business operations. In this guide we will review how to check if a maintenance alert is the cause of your service disruptions.

Staying Informed with Azure Health Services

If you are a nonprofit that is new to Azure, managing your subscription can be daunting. Azure is a powerful platform that constantly iterates adding advanced services. More importantly, there are times that services hosted on Azure may need to be down for maintenance, expanding new service rollouts, and platform updates. Azure Health Services helps keep you up to date for your subscriptions Globally. Getting a high-level understanding of any new service alerts will keep organization.

Image of concerned Cybersecurity Analyst for the region being down.

What is Azure Service Health?

Service Health is hosted on the Azure Platform, which is secure, reliable, and flexible. Allowing organizations to have the tools and services they need at any moment notice. Although Azure is globally available, there are times when services or regions may be down for maintenance. It is important to monitor services to get a full picture view of your development landscape. That bug you caught may simply be a service being unavailable for maintenance. So, a scheduled site maintenance may suffice for your audience.

Resource health, Azure status, and Service health are the dynamic trio that make up Azure Service Health. Presenting a unified experience within Azure with all the combined services.

Azure status: Global view of services unavailability.
Resource health: Information about personal individual cloud resources which utilizes Azure Monitor to setup alerts & notify members about services being unavailable.
Service health: View of services within your personal subscription that may be experiencing an outage, maintenance, and advisories.

Service Health Menu

Active Events
- Service issues: Real-time information about ongoing service issues affecting your Azure resources. It helps you stay informed about any disruptions and their impact on your services, enabling you to take appropriate actions to mitigate the effects.
- Planned maintenance: This feature notifies you about upcoming maintenance events that may affect your Azure resources. It includes details about the schedule, scope, and potential impact of the maintenance
- Health advisories: Important updates and recommendations regarding the health of your Azure resources. It includes information about potential issues, best practices, and guidance to help you maintain the optimal performance and availability of your services.
- Security advisories: Provides critical information about security-related issues and vulnerabilities that may affect your Azure resources. It includes details about the nature of the threats, recommended actions, and updates to help you protect your services and data from potential security risks.

Disclaimer: In order to view Security advisories, updates, notifications, and important information about personal services and resources impacted by outages, critical, and non-business issues across regions.

History

- Health history: provides a detailed record of the health status of your Azure resources over time. It includes information about past incidents, maintenance events, and health advisories, allowing you to analyze trends and identify recurring issues.

Resources Health
- Resource health: provides a comprehensive view of the health status of your Azure resources. It helps you quickly identify and diagnose issues, ensuring that you can maintain the availability and performance of your services. Detailed information about resource health, including current and past incidents, planned maintenance, and health advisories.

Alerts
- Health alerts: Real-time notifications about the health status of your Azure resources. It alerts you to any issues or changes that may affect the availability and performance of your services

Creating an Alert Rule

Now that we know a little more about Azure Health Service. Let's explore creating your first alert. First you need to navigate the Azure Portal at https://portal.azure.com. After logging in you will need to type in the top search bar Service health then click the heart icon. You need to have an active service you will need to have created a resource group and a active service within the resource group for example a virtual machine. This is necessary if you want to set up the optional step under Actions. Next follow the steps below to create a service alert:

In the left-hand menu under Active Events, then select "Service issues."
For the scope, select the subscription you would like to receive alerts. then click "Next: Condition."
Under Condition in the dropdown selectors Services, Regions, and Event types click "Select all," then click "Next: Actions."
You will now create a action group. Click on the "Create action group" button then fill out the following:
1. Basic: Select the "Subscription, Resource group, and Region." Then under instance details, name your "Action group name" and "Display name." Then select "Next: Notification."
2. Notifications: Select the "Notification type" and then create a unique name under "Name." Under Notification type choose between "Email/Azure Resource Manager" role to email specific roles within your subscription to receive notifications. Then select the roles then click ok. We will choose this option to save time though it is recommended you create two alerts using both Email/Azure Resource Manager and Email/SMS message/Push/Voice. Once you are done select "Next: Actions."
3. Actions: You now will select the "Action type" and the Name. Choose between the types of resources to receive a condition-based alert. You then will need to follow the instructions pertaining to which service.
  - Automation Runbook
  - Azure Function
  - Event Hub
  - ITSM
  - Logic App
  - Secure Webhook
  - Webhook
4. Tags: You can create tags as an option to track. Choose relevant tags depending on the subscription, department, team, or testing as an example. Create the "Name" and "Value." Select "Review + Create."
5. Review + Create: Review all the information is correct and the pricing and privacy statement information then select "Create."
After you create your action group you will then be sent back to the "Create an alert rule" where you will continue creating your alert, then click the "Next: Details."
In Details, under Alert rule details create an "Alert rule name" and description, then click "Next: Tags."
Create "Name" and "Value" pair for your tags for your alert. Then select "Next: Review + create."
Review all details are correct then click "Create."

Creating the alert might take a few minutes, but once it is ready, you will see a notification under the bell icon located in the top menu. Congratulations on taking your first step in creating a plan to be prepared. Setting up alerts keeps your team up to date with the latest information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you learned about Azure's tools to inform users of the health of operations of services globally. Teams can track issues concerning their personal resources and improve security, outages, and planned maintenance. You also started down the path of improving your security practices within Azure, so way to go. If you would like to take a even deeper look by following quick start guides and tutorials with the links below. Now, go learn, grow, and achieve the mission that you are so passionate about.