Quick tip: setting up a global Azure Service Health alert

Introduction

I work on Azure projects on a daily basis, so I want to be kept up to date about its health. This includes service incidents and planned maintenance.

It’s super easy to set up an alert for these kinds of events, but it seems that many of us don’t have this configured. So let’s take a look at the few simple steps it takes to turn this on.

Setting up the alert

Service Health gives you a personalized view of the health of your environment. You can access it in the Azure portal by searching for Service Health in the All services menu, or via the Azure Monitor:

Once in Service Health, you can browse issues and maintenance notifications in the left pane. We’re interested in setting up an alert. To do this, choose Health alerts:

Now add a new health alert with the top left button on the right pane:

To configure a health alert, you first define some criteria that specify what needs to be monitored. Next, you add one or more action groups that define where to send the notifications.

If you’re not familiar with creating action groups, see here.

My global alert rule looks like this:

I want to receive an alert for any event type, in any service, in any region. So under ALERT TARGET, I have checked everything in the dropdown lists. To do this, open each dropdown list and check Select all:

Of course, you could create more refined alerts, by checking only the events, services and regions you’re interested in. This can be useful if you want to set up alerts targeted at different action groups, for example to notify a different administrator for each region. You might also not care about health issues in regions you’re not using, but I like to stay informed.

Under ACTION GROUPS, I have added one action group that sends me an email.

What does a Service Health event look like?

With the alert in place, I will receive an email for every Azure service issue, planned maintenance, health and security advisory worldwide.

Such an email might look like this:

The big blue button takes you back to Azure Service Health, where you can find and review all triggered alerts.

Thanks for reading!

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