In our landscape we've got a couple of web application gateways deployed with probes set-up to back-end services. In the resource panes of the gateways there is the "Backend Health" option that you can use to check the health state of your back-ends, which is very nice.
Now we were building some dashboards and we wanted to include the same status overview on one of those. I couldn't find a way to do that. Of course there's Azure monitor which you can use to also check the status but I'd then have two solutions doing exactly the same thing just because I need the data to surface on a dashboard. That doesn't feel right.
So the question is; does anyone know of a better way to do this, or am I really bound to the alternative option of monitoring twice?
You can create Alerts if the probes goes down. As of now, Probe health is not exposed to Dashboards. Please raise a User voice to get it added in the future: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback?query=dashboard
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If you go to Azure webapp, and on the left hand panel select Application Insights. Then View Application Insights Data and then click the Availability on the left hand panel, you can add new tests. Basically, here you can specify the health/ping endpoint for the site. You can also here configure some associated rules for the alerts.
Now, Azure has got a new functionality which is called Health Check on the webapp. All you have to do is enable it, and give it your health/ping endpoint. Then you can also configure rules here.
With both methods, the health endpoint is triggered by azure and if something is not right based on the alert rules you get an alert message.
But what is the difference between the two approaches?
The difference is that if your web app runs in multi instances(if you specify the scale rules), for Health check, if an instance fails to respond to the ping, the system determines it is unhealthy and removes it from the load balancer rotation. This increases your application’s average availability and resiliency.
Availability-test in Application Insights does not do such thing, it just checks the health.
You can review these docs: Health Check is now Generally Available, Does App Service Health Checks logs in Application Insights?, What App Service does with Health checks.
App Insights Data Availability is very specified for checking health and alerting via some mode, while Health check was released for a way bigger prospects with the facility of
Health check for all instances every 1 min (somewhere what availability test does)
Removes the instance if ping fails.
restarts underlying VM
replaces the instance if needed
Helps in scale out/up for new instances.
Moreover, this can be used for more stuff like reporting etc. please make sure that it's not used for premium services.
Right now I'm limited to using only Azure dashboards for reporting on resources. A dashboard I need to create is one where only the resource health of my resources is displayed the way it is displayed by going to Dashboard->Monitor->Service Health. I need to be able to choose only my resource types and have them display in a nice list with a green arrow for up and that red X for down. Is this possible to do from inside the portal? It's imperative that those that use the dashboard do not have to click anything to see the healthy/unhealthy status. I basically need the list below, but for all of my resources, not just AKS.
Thanks!
I actually found the answer, it's in preview. Create a workbook and add a query. In the query, choose "Azure Health (preview)", for the resource type choose "Subscription" and BOOM!, there it is. This was easier than I thought, I just had to do some heavy digging. I hope this helps other people trying to do this. Oh, and I pinned this to a dashboard and everyone was thrilled.
Interesting ask indeed. AFAIK, pinning Azure Resource Health filtered by resource type to the Azure Dashboard is not supported as of today. Also, I noticed that the pin icon atop the page only creates a shortcut to Azure Service issues but not to the Resource Health blade.
You can submit your suggestion to the Azure Service Health Product Group through their feedback forum, or upvote this similar idea.
If one application have Azure serviceBus, EventHub in diff Azure Namesapces, web application and also other azure services (eg: cognitive services). can these be accessed with one URL by using Gateway or Load balancer or traffic manager or any other option ?
My problem is - if we have diff namesapces, we need to whitelist every time when there is new Namespaces and it could so too much of a work. so wondering if we can have one common DNS/URL that would make life easier.
Today, Service Bus and Event Hubs don't support any sort of network gateway. This is due to fact that namespace in the connection string used for authorization purpose at the service side.
To add a bit of context to Serkant's statement, support for this scenario is something that is on our roadmap, and hopefully in the near term. Unfortunately, I don't have a date to share currently. The work is being tracked [here] should you wish to keep an eye on it.
I have below two questions can someone help on them.
1.Is there a script or a way to create custom alert format for azure alerts?
2.Is there a way to pin all the azure VM status to dashboard?
Regarding #1, the feature to customize or configure alert email format is currently not supported. If interested, I suggest you to raise your feedback / feature request here in UserVoice / feedback forum. Responsible product / feature team would triage / start checking feasibility and would prioritize the feedback.
Regarding #2, If 'status' is meant as 'PowerState' (i.e., status of VM whether it is running, deallocated, etc.) or if it's meant as 'StatusCode' (i.e., ok, etc.) or if it's meant as 'ProvisioningState' (i.e., succeeded, etc.) then I don't think we have straight-forward way for it so that we can ingest that particular data directly to dashboard but said that, you may just leverage 'Heartbeat' Log Analytics Kusto table at first place and create a custom view as dashboard using view designer but as views in Azure Monitor are being phased out and replaced with workbooks so I suggest leveraging these workbooks now.
If not, you may leverage a new feature called as Azure Monitor for VMs which basically helps to analyze the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs, and monitor their processes and dependencies on other resources and external processes. Here again, you can create interactive reports Azure Monitor for VMs with VM insights workbooks.
Hope these inputs helps!
Is there any way to get Azure status update only for some services and regions I am using? For example, I am using Cloud Services in West US. When this service in West US is down, I want to get an alert for it. I don't care about other services and other regions.
If you set up alert notifications for your application, you'll get notified when any of the underlying services you're using are not functioning properly. An alert will ensure that your service is available and working.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/insights-receive-alert-notifications/
If you get an alert about a service issue, that's when I would first take a look at the Azure status dashboard, and then take a look at your application logs to troubleshoot.
Another trick is to create simple URL's in your application that do a quick service test. For example, let's say you're using blob storage in the west datacenter. You could set up a page that does a test write/read to ensure that service is working. This will give you a 100% accurate indication if there is a problem. Since the cloud is highly distributed, and services statuses don't update immediately, I find this method highly preferable.
You would then point your alert monitoring at URL's like this:
http://yourapp.com/
http://yourapp.com/blobtest
http://yourapp.com/redistest
The Azure Status website has the information your need for all Azure regions.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/