Description:

Azure resources such as App Services, Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, and Event Hubs offer Basic or Consumption SKUs designed for low-cost, lightweight workloads. These tiers do not support advanced monitoring, diagnostic logs, autoscale features, or availability guarantees required for production workloads. To ensure proper observability and operational reliability, production or security-critical workloads must use Standard, Premium, or higher SKUs.


Rationale:

Using Basic or Consumption tiers limits monitoring visibility, reduces diagnostic logging capabilities, and restricts integration with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and SIEM tools. This creates blind spots in operational and security monitoring. Upgrading to a supported SKU ensures adequate diagnostics, alerting, autoscaling, and high availability for production workloads.


Impact:

Upgrading SKUs increases operational costs but provides essential monitoring, logging, alerting, and performance capabilities required for production readiness.


Default Value:

Workloads may be deployed using Basic or Consumption SKUs unless explicitly configured otherwise.

Pre-requisites:

  • RBAC permissions to view and modify resource configurations

  • Cost impact approval if SKU upgrade is required


Test Plan:

  1. Sign in to the Azure Portal.

  2. Search for and open the Azure resource
     (for example: App Service, Function App, API Management, Event Hub).

  3. Navigate to Scale up / Pricing tier / Plan (name varies by service).

  4. Identify the currently selected SKU.

  5. Verify the SKU is Standard, Premium, Dedicated, or higher.

  6. Confirm the SKU is not

    • Basic

    • Free

    • Shared

    • Consumption (for production or monitored workloads)

  7. If an unsupported SKU is detected, follow the Implementation Steps to upgrade the SKU.


Implementation Steps:

  1. Sign in to the Azure Portal.

  2. Search for and open the Azure resource
     (App Service, Function App, API Management, Event Hub, etc.).

  3. Navigate to Scale up / Pricing tier / Plan (menu name varies by service).

  4. Review the current SKU.

  5. Select a Standard, Premium, Dedicated, or higher SKU.

  6. Review the cost and feature differences.

  7. Click Save / Apply to apply the change.

  8. Verify the resource status after the upgrade.


Backout Plan:

  1. Sign in to the Azure Portal.

  2. Search for and open the Azure resource.

  3. Navigate to Scale up / Pricing tier / Plan.

  4. Select the previous SKU (for example, Basic or Consumption).

  5. Review cost and feature changes.

  6. Click Save / Apply.

  7. Verify the resource is running normally.


Reference: