Azure Service Health
Managing your Azure services over a cloud environment can be difficult. Especially when you have tons of services and resources located in different regions. In a business environment, managing service errors can mean the difference between preventing potential losses and seeking profit. Without a proper method to manage your issues, you can do more harm than you think.
The need of the hour is a solution to manage the health of your Azure resources with ease. And that’s what Azure Service Health is all about. It’s a dedicated portal that allows you to track issues in your Azure resources.
In this post, you will understand what is Azure Service health along with its features and benefits.
Table of Contents
- What is Azure Service Health?
- How to Check Azure Service Health for any errors?
- How is Azure Service Health different from Azure status Portal?
- Why should we use Azure Service Health?
- How to add alerts in Azure service Health?
- Wrapping Up
What is Azure Service Health?
As mentioned in the introduction, Azure Service Health is a portal that lets you manage your Azure resources by tracking issues in them. These issues can be anything from health issues to downtime errors that occur due to maintenance. Azure Service Health portal helps you stay on top of all such issues with a dedicated dashboard and customizable notifications.
The best part about Azure Service Health is that it’s free. Azure health service tracks three different issues to make your life easier.
Issues regarding service
This type of issue is found under the “Service Issues” tab in Azure Service Health. Any service issues that are causing downtime will be displayed under this tab with a detailed summary and potential impact of the issues. You can also understand how Microsoft is working to fix these issues in your resources.
You have the option to filter the issues based on the following -
- Type of Service
- Subscription
- Region
Issues regarding maintenance
The world-class team at Microsoft Azure conducts regular maintenance runs to keep all its resources at top-notch performance. So it is common for them to take down some of your resources for maintenance.
But all these maintenance issues are pre-scheduled and can be viewed under the “Planned Maintenance” tab in Azure Service Health. Once you click on this tab, you can have a look at the date and duration of these planned maintenance issues. It will also give you an impact on the maintenance of your services, regions, and subscriptions.
Azure service health also offers a shareable link and a tracking ID for your reference. You can feed this into a tracking system to stay on top of your downtimes. This crucial feature allows you to plan your downtime and allocate other resources accordingly.
Health Advisories and other issues
The third tab - “Health Advisories” keeps you notified about issues like service depreciation on your Azure resources. This feature becomes crucial when you are managing several of Azure’s resources. With prior notification you can switch your servers or reinstate your services, allowing you to reduce your downtime errors.
When you set up the notifications in the right way (we’ll talk about that at the end of this blog), you can eliminate downtime.
How to check Azure Service Health for any errors?
By now you would have realized that issues or errors can be easily checked using the Azure Service Health portal. But how do you get to the portal? Here’s a quick step-by-step guide.
- Log into your Azure Service Health portal
- Choose “All Services” from the menu.
- From the “All Services” tab click on Service Health.
- The Azure Service Health dashboard will be displayed on your screen.
- Any issues or errors will be displayed with its name and description
- If there are no issues or errors, the following message will be displayed - “No service issues found”.
- To make your life easier, you can even configure alerts to notify you of any errors or maintenance issues.
How is Azure Service Health different from the Azure Status Portal?
If we have to define Azure Service Health and Azure Status Portal in one word each, then it will be the below –
- Azure Status Page - Generic
- Azure Service Health - Personalized
The Azure status page allows you to take a look at outages or server downtimes when you cannot log in to your Azure Service Health dashboard. You can take a look at the health of all the servers across all the regions.
But the Azure Status Portal is not personalized, as you need to manually search for the service and regions to take a look at their health. Adding to that, the status portal does not display the schedule of maintenance events and your health advisories. All this data will only be displayed in your Service Health portal. That’s a lot of time wasted in searching for resources.
Why should we use Azure Service Health?
Service Health’s most useful feature is Service Health alerts. With these health alerts, you’ll proactively receive notifications via your preferred channel—email, SMS, push notification or even webhook into your internal ticketing system like ServiceNow or PagerDuty—if there’s an issue with your services and regions. You no longer have to keep checking the Service Health dashboard or the status page for updates. Instead, you can focus on other important work.
By leveraging the power of Azure service Health alerts, you can keep a check on your health issues and advisories. This single piece of automation can save you precious time and prevent downtime errors.
Another reason to use Azure Service Health is the official reports and RCA’s. You can use persistent links to track the status of services with management software. You can also share these links to view on a mobile device(in real-time).
To add to this, Azure allows you to download them as Excel Files and RCA’s. After downloading it, you can share it to your managers or higher officials. This can also aid you in preparing your own report without hassle.
How to Add Alerts in Azure Service Health?
Adding alerts to your Azure Service Health is one of the easiest tasks in the Portal. Do it right and you will save tons of time and potential headaches in the future.
Here’s how you set it up -
Step 1
You need to create a RULE for your alerts. This will determine the regions and services for which you want your notifications to be displayed.
Step 2
In the Action group, you can add the person you wish to notify in the presence of an issue.
Step 3
Select how to notify them. Example: SMS, Webhooks, Push Notifications, etc.
And that’s all it takes. You’ve successfully added alerts for your service health.
Wrapping Up
Azure Service health can be a godsend when you choose the right triggers and action person for your notifications. It will help eliminate or suppress downtimes with ease and will save a lot of effort from your side. So go ahead and start using Azure Service Health today.