Azure Service Health: How to create a pinned health world map and a service health alert

In a previous blog post I already told you how Azure Service Health can keep you informed about service issues and maintenance. In this blog post I will show you two ways how you can setup alerting for this service.

How to pin a personalized health world map to your Azure dashboard

To pin a personalized health map to your dashboard you can follow the below steps:

Go to the Azure Service Health blade (open trough the sidebar, Azure Global Search or the Azure Monitor blade).

To personalize the world map, select all Azure Subscription(s), Region(s) and Service(s) you want to be informed about on the Service issues event page.

When you have customized your view, click on the pin on the right of the screen, and type in a unique Query name. Click OK to save.

When you now open your Dashboard, through the popup or through the sidebar, you will see a personalized world map with your selected Azure Region(s) is available.

If all is fine with your Azure services, a green dot(s) is shown. Whenever there is an issue or incident in a specific region for your selected Service(s) a red dot will be shown.

How to create a service health alert

Through the integration with Azure Monitor, Azure Service Health can alert and notify you in advance via email, text message or push/webhook notifications when your business-critical Azure resources are impacted by an Azure backbone outage.

If you did not setup any service health alert you will also be advised to set one up trough the new Operational excellence category in Azure Advisor.

As a step you can perform in advance (no requirement), you can already create an Azure Monitor action group to route the alert to the appropriate people in your organization. You can read all about creating such an action group with Azure PowerShell over here.

Go to the Azure Service Health blade (open trough the sidebar, Azure Global Search or the Azure Monitor blade) ,open Health alerts and click on + Add service health alert.

Select the Subscription, Service(s), and Region(s) you want to be alerted for.

Under Event type, choose the event types you want to be alerted for (you can select all or just one or two). The event types you can choose about are: Service issue, Planned maintenance and Health advisories.

Under ACTIONS, select or create a new action group (in my example I will use the action group created in my previous blog post, email-ag).

The specify an Alert rule name and Description. Then select the Resource group where you want the alert to be saved and finally click on Create alert rule to create it.

Summary

In this blog post I showed you how can setup alerting for the Azure Service Health service. First we configured a personalized health map to pin to your dashboard and secondly we setup a configurable service health alert, to sent notifications by email in case of an issue.

I hope this can help you in setting up a more manageable and reliable Azure environment(s). If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.