Description:

An Activity Log Alert for Service Health is a notification system in Azure that triggers alerts based on the health status of your Azure services. This alert helps you stay informed about issues or outages affecting Azure services in your region, ensuring that you can take proactive measures when there are disruptions in services that could impact your workloads.

By creating an Activity Log Alert for Service Health, you can receive notifications on incidents, outages, or planned maintenance events that affect the Azure services your organization relies on.

Rationale:

Service interruptions, performance degradation, or ongoing maintenance events may disrupt your services, applications, and business processes. By configuring Activity Log Alerts for Service Health, you can be immediately informed of these incidents, allowing you to respond promptly and take necessary actions to minimize any potential business impact.

This setup is essential for staying up-to-date with Azure's service health status, especially when running mission-critical workloads on Azure.

Impact:

Configuring an Activity Log Alert for Service Health ensures that you receive timely notifications regarding the health of the services you rely on. This improves operational efficiency by allowing quicker detection of issues. However, enabling alerts may lead to higher volumes of notifications depending on the number of Azure services used and the regions your resources are deployed in.

Default Value:

By default, Service Health Alerts are not configured for specific resource activities. You need to manually create and configure Activity Log Alerts based on Service Health events.

Pre-requisites:

  • Azure subscription.

  • Owner or Contributor role permissions for creating Activity Log Alerts.

  • Azure Monitor and Activity Log Alerts enabled for the subscription.

  • Service Health data available for the relevant Azure services.

Audit:

  1. Sign in to Azure portal as an Owner or Contributor.

  2. Navigate to Azure Monitor and review the Activity Log Alerts to ensure that Service Health alerts are configured.

  3. Ensure that the configured alert correctly notifies users of service health issues related to the Azure services your resources rely on.

Implementation Steps (Automated):

  1. Sign in to Azure portal:

    • Use an account with Owner or Contributor permissions.

  2. Navigate to Azure Monitor:

    • In the Azure portal, search for Azure Monitor and select it from the search results.

  3. Go to Activity Log Alerts:

    • In Azure Monitor, go to Activity Log and then click on Alerts.

    • Under Activity Log Alerts, select + New Alert Rule.

  4. Create a New Alert for Service Health:

    • Under Scope, click Select a resource and choose your subscription or resource group.

    • Under Condition, select Service Health as the Signal Type.

      • Set the Alert Criteria to trigger notifications based on Service Health events.

      • You can filter by Event categories such as Incident, Maintenance, or Planned Maintenance.

      • You can also select Severity (e.g., Critical, Warning) to customize the type of events for which you want to be alerted.

  5. Example of criteria:

    • Signal Name: Service Health

    • Event Category: Incident, Maintenance

    • Severity: Critical, Warning

  6. Set Up Action Group:

    • Under Action group, select or create an Action Group to define how the alert will notify you (e.g., via Email, SMS, Webhook, etc.).

    • You can also define who should receive the notification (e.g., email addresses of your IT team).

  7. Review and Create:

    • Review the configuration and click Create to save the alert rule.

Automate Alert Creation Using Azure CLI: If you prefer to automate the process of creating Activity Log Alerts for Service Health, use the following Azure CLI command:

az monitor activity-log alert create \

    --name "ServiceHealthAlert" \

    --resource-group <Resource-Group-Name> \

    --condition "serviceHealth" \

    --action-group <Action-Group-ID> \

    --description "Alert for Azure Service Health incidents" \

    --enabled true

  1. Test the Alert:

    • After configuring the Activity Log Alert, trigger a test alert (e.g., by forcing a service health issue on a test resource) to verify that the alerting mechanism works and that notifications are properly delivered.

  2. Monitor and Review Alerts:

    • Regularly review the Alert history in Azure Monitor to ensure that you are receiving Service Health alerts as expected.

    • Configure Azure Monitor to aggregate these alerts in a central dashboard to facilitate review.

Backout Plan (Automated):

  1. Sign in to Azure portal:

    • Use an account with Owner or Contributor permissions.

  2. Navigate to Azure Monitor:

    • Go to Azure Monitor in the Azure portal.

  3. Delete or Modify the Alert:

    • In Activity Log Alerts, find the Service Health Alert you created.

    • Select the alert rule and either delete it or modify the conditions based on your backout requirements (e.g., adjust the action group, change the severity, etc.).

  4. Test and Verify:

    • After making modifications or deleting the alert, ensure that the alerting system is functioning as expected or that notifications have been stopped as per the backout plan.

References: