Table of Contents
Microsoft Azure is one of the largest cloud computing platforms in the world, used by millions of businesses and individuals. However, like all vast distributed systems, Azure services too can occasionally face disruptions and outages. Having visibility into Azure status helps understand ongoing issues and plan workarounds. Pursuing Azure Training can help you have a complete understanding of the same. To make it easier for you, this guide discusses tools and techniques to monitor Azure health status in real-time. Let’s get started.
Is Azure Down? Checking Status
The most straightforward way is to use different apps available online that allows you to monitor Azure accessibility. With the help of the respective application you can get an idea about whether Azure is operational or experiencing issues.
It provides recent Azure outage history along with dates, durations, affected regions/services for reference. Additional details may exist on the Azure Status Dashboard.
Azure Status Dashboard
Microsoft maintains a transparent Azure Service Health Dashboard at https://status.azure.com showing current service performance status categorized by subscriptions.
Users get updates on planned maintenance, incident investigations and resolutions in progress. Filters enable viewing status specific to regions like US, Europe etc. Push notifications can be enabled for proactive outage alerts.
The depth of insight depends on severity levels clearly defined:
- Green – All services operational
- Yellow – Performance issues with minor customer impact
- Orange – Degraded service impacting some customers
- Red – Major outage ongoing with widespread customer impact
RSS feeds too allow subscribing to automatic updates via third-party monitoring tools. Regularly checking provides visibility to emerging problems.
Azure Advisor Notifications
Advisor within the Azure portal issues personalized recommendations to optimize resources. It also sends notifications regarding subscription health suggesting corrective actions when potential issues surface:
- Performance degradation warnings
- Auto-fix suggestions to resolve issues
- Security and high availability recommendations
- Optimization best practices for costs and scalability
Timely responses to alerts help address minor problems before escalating to major disruptions.
Monitor Azure Resources
Setting up monitoring for VMs, web apps, databases and other resource types illuminates component-level performance:
- Metrics chart uptime, CPU/memory usage, request rates etc.
- Alerts on configured metrics thresholds using email/SMS
- Diagnostic logs examine errors, exceptions in depth
- Activity logs audit operations across subscriptions
Pinpointing root causes helps troubleshoot proactively rather than waiting for outages. Automated scaling avoids SLA breaches.
Related: Azure Cloud Shell – Revolutionize Your Cloud Management
Third Party Monitoring
Beyond official channels, additional tools provide centralized alerting and visualization of Azure infrastructure:
- LogicMonitor – End-to-end performance visibility across teams
- SolarWinds – Infrastructure monitoring with auto-dependencies mapping
- Datadog – Serverless monitoring for functions, Kubernetes insights
- Nagios – Veteran open-source infrastructure monitoring
- New Relic – Single pane-of-glass for distributed applications
These services integrate with Azure APIs/services for automated failover drills improving reliability.
Check Azure Service Health API
Programmatically access Azure health metadata via the service health API REST endpoint:
It returns real-time JSON status of all regions and subscriptions as per filters. Useful for building custom monitoring dashboards and automating responses like auto-scaling.
Key API attributes include:
- Timestamp
- Category (incidents, planned works etc.)
- Region impacted
- Services affected
- Communication details
- Status (in progress, mitigated etc.)
Azure Monitor Open Source SDKs exist for multiple languages/platforms to consume this data seamlessly.
Related: AWS CloudWatch vs Azure Sentinel
Best Practices for Monitoring
To ensure optimum Azure uptime, a few monitoring best practices help:
- Set up health and performance alerts on all critical resources
- Enable diagnostic logs, activity audit trail for forensics
- Evaluate Azure Advisor recommendations regularly
- Test failover, auto-scaling scenarios periodically
- Backup VMs, databases to Geo-redundant accounts
- Monitor third-party APIs, applications thoroughly
- Maintain live site mirrors for redirection during outages
- Subscribe to official communication channels
- Check APIs for early warnings programmatically
Proactive monitoring forms the foundation of a reliable cloud infrastructure delivering consistent services to customers.
Summary
Cloud outages can significantly impact productivity and costs. Constantly keeping tabs on the health status of Azure products helps troubleshoot issues and communicate status transparently to stakeholders. While the Azure dashboard offers core insights, integrating additional monitoring tools provides comprehensive visibility for maintaining performance SLAs as businesses scale on cloud.