The importance of setting up Service and Resource Health monitoring in Azure

When issues arise with applications or systems hosted in Azure, it's common to see customers scrambling to identify the root cause. Often, this is due to a lack of proactive monitoring and alerts, leaving teams reactive instead of being prepared. This post highlights the importance of Azure’s Service Health and Resource Health features, how they can save time, and why setting up alerts should be a part of your organization’s foundational Azure practices.

A common scenario

Imagine this: Your production system is experiencing login failures, impacting business operations. You reach out to your IT team or Azure support, only to find there are no known outages or issues listed on the Azure status page. You spend hours troubleshooting, only to discover that a resource configuration or localized issue is causing the problem. This scenario, which is all too familiar, underscores the importance of monitoring tools already available in Azure.

Azure monitoring tools you should use

Azure provides two key tools to help organizations stay ahead of issues:

1. Azure Service Health

Azure Service Health provides insights into global service issues, planned maintenance, health advisories and security advisories for Azure services. With Service Health, you can:

• Track outages or service degradations in your region.
• View planned maintenance that might affect your workloads.
• Get personalized dashboards tailored to the services and regions you use.

Service issues dashboard:

Planned maintenance dashboard:

Health advisories dashboard:

Security advisories dashboard:

2. Azure Resource Health

Azure Resource Health focuses on the health of your specific resources. It helps identify whether a resource’s availability is impacted due to platform issues, configuration changes, or user actions. Key benefits include:

• Detailed insights into why a resource might be unavailable.
• Guidance for resolving issues, with a clear status of “Available”, “Unavailable”, or “Unknown”.
• Visibility into historical health events for auditing and diagnostics.

The missing piece: proactive alerts

Monitoring tools are only effective if you’re notified when something goes wrong. Without alerts, you might miss critical events. Setting up proactive alerts for Service Health and Resource Health ensures your team is notified immediately, allowing you to respond quickly.

How to set up Service Health alerts:

1. Navigate to Resource Health Alerts.
2. Click “+Create”.
3. Under Scope, select your subscription.
4. Under Condition, choose “Service Health” as Signal name.
5. Customize the alert focusing on services and regions you use, then choose the event type you want to be alerted:
   
   
6. Define an Action Group to notify your team via email, SMS, or Teams.
7. Click to review + create

How to set up Resource Health alerts

Resource Health alerts focus on issues specific to your resources, such as Virtual Machines, App Services, or Databases.

Steps to create Resource Health alerts:

1. Navigate to Resource Health.
2. Click “+ Add resource health alert”.
3. Under Scope, select the subscription, resource groups and/or resources you want to monitor.
   
   
   
   
4. Under Condition, “Resource Health” will be the Signal name. Then select:
   
   
   

   o   Event status: Active, In Progress, Resolved, Updated, All

   o   Current resource status: Available, Degraded, Unavailable, All

   o   Previous resource status: Available, Degraded, Unavailable, Unknown, All

   o   Reason type: Platform Initiated, Uknown, User Initiated, All
   
   

5. Define an Action Group to ensure timely notifications.
6. Under Details, select the subscription and resource group in which to save the alert rule
7. Click to Review + create

Expanding your monitoring strategy

While Azure Service Health and Azure Resource Health are essential, they should be part of a more comprehensive Azure monitoring strategy. To enhance observability and proactive issue detection, organizations should also implement:

1. Azure monitoring best practices

A well-structured monitoring strategy ensures that your cloud infrastructure remains reliable, secure, and optimized for performance. Following Azure monitoring best practices helps organizations:

• Improve visibility into resource usage, dependencies, and performance bottlenecks.
• Reduce the risk of unexpected downtime by setting up robust alerting and logging mechanisms.
• Establish centralized dashboards to correlate insights across services.
• Enhance security and compliance by tracking unauthorized access and anomalies.

Start planning your Azure Monitor implementation with this guide. Then, explore best practices for configuring data collection and effectively monitoring your Azure workloads here.

Finally, check out this architecture design for a comprehensive Azure Monitor implementation:

2. Azure monitor baseline alerts

Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts provide predefined alerting recommendations for common Azure resources, ensuring that organizations follow industry standards for monitoring. These alerts help:

• Detect and respond to performance degradation, security threats, and cost anomalies.
• Reduce manual configuration efforts by using recommended alerting rules.
• Improve incident response times by ensuring teams are notified promptly.

To get started with Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts, visit this resource.

Why monitoring should be a priority

Organizations that rely on Azure often assume everything will work seamlessly until it doesn’t. When issues arise, the lack of monitoring can result in:

• Delayed incident response.
• Prolonged downtime.
• Increased operational costs due to firefighting.

By enabling Service and Resource Health alerts, you:

• Gain proactive notifications for Azure-wide or resource-specific issues.
• Reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Empower your team with insights to act quickly and minimize business impact.

Conclusion

The tools for proactive monitoring are readily available in Azure, yet many organizations fail to leverage them effectively. Don’t wait for the next incident to discover the importance of monitoring. Set up Service Health and Resource Health alerts today to ensure you’re prepared for any disruptions.

By taking these steps, you can shift from being reactive to proactive, ensuring your systems remain resilient and your teams stay ahead of potential problems.

Take Action:

• Set up Service Health alerts (Guide).
• Set up Resource Health alerts (Guide).

Proactive monitoring is key to ensuring smooth operations in Azure. Start today and build a resilient foundation for your cloud workloads!