For any IT professional it is very important to be alerted or informed on any issue with the Infrastructure he or she is supporting. Same is true for Cloud! Though it is very rare, outages or planned maintenance do occur in Azure environment.
Today’s blog is about setting up a process to alert teams with notification for any planned maintenance or a service issue in Azure. This will help support teams to respond quickly and take necessary actions to limit downtime.
To set up alerting , we will first set up an action group in Azure which will send email notification. You can also create action group to send SMS/Push notification or create ticket in ITSM system or execute a function etc. For this example, we will set up email notification.
Create Azure Action Group
1. Login to Azure portal and search for “Alerts”.
2. Click on Alerts. In the Alert page, click on Manage actions.
3. Click on Add action group to setup a new action group.
4. In Add action group panel, provide a name and a short name for action group.Note, short name of action group should not exceed 12 characters. Action group name must be unique in a resource group. Select your correct subscription from the drop down and a resource group which will host your action group.Next, you need to provide an action name , for example “mail” or “sms” represents if the action will send an email or an sms alert. Select corresponding Action Type corresponding to the name.
When you select an Action type, you need to configure it with required values. For example, if you have selected Mail/SMS/Push/Voice, provide a valid email address or phone number etc. Refer following screenshot to get an idea on how options should be set:
Once Action group has been successfully created, we will create a Service Health alert as described in below section. For this example, we will set up alerts for any planned maintenance and service failure.
Configure Service Health Alert
- Login to Azure portal. Search for Service Health as shown in following screenshot and click on it:
2. Click on Health alerts in the Service Health | Service issues window :
3. Click on Add service health alert to configure a new alert.
4. Select your target subscription and service names to get notifications for only services you are using in Azure. In addition, you need to select regions. You can select all or only specific regions where you have deployed your resources.
5. Now, select Event type for alerting. In this example, as discussed, we will select only Planned maintenance and Service issue as shown in the screenshot.
6. For Action group, click on Add button and select the Action group created previously as shown in the screenshot :
7. Provide an Alert rule name and description for the alert rule. Select a resource group to store this Alert rule. If you want to enable this alert rule immediately after creation, select Yes for Enable rule upon creation option. Finally click on Create alert rule button to create this alert rule.
You have successfully set up your Azure Service Health alerting. You should now start getting email alerts for any maintenance or service issue for the list of Azure services you have selected for your selected regions.
Hope you find this post helpful! Let me know if you have any question or concern.