What is Azure Service Health?
Azure Service Health is a free platform service from Microsoft Azure that keeps you informed about events affecting the Azure services you use. Instead of manually checking the global status channel, you get a personalized view: Service Health shows only the services and regions that your subscriptions actually use. This lets you quickly determine whether an issue affects your own workloads.
The service consists of three components. Azure Status (available at azure.status.microsoft) shows the global health of all Azure services across all regions. Service Health provides the personalized view of the services and regions you use. Resource Health represents the minute-by-minute availability of individual resources, such as a specific virtual machine. This makes it possible to distinguish whether a problem stems from a platform-wide outage or from the specific resource.
Core Features
- Three health layers: Azure Status for the global platform health, Service Health for the services and regions you use, and Resource Health for the availability of individual resources, refreshed minute by minute.
- Four event classes: Active service issues, planned maintenance, health advisories, and security advisories. Security advisories require configured subscription or elevated access permissions.
- Alerting via Azure Monitor: Service Health and Resource Health alerts notify via email, SMS, mobile push, or webhook. Webhooks route events directly into ticketing and incident tools such as ServiceNow or PagerDuty.
- Programmatic access: A REST API, Azure Resource Graph tables with sample queries for Resource Health, and an API endpoint for security advisories. Through Azure Lighthouse, service providers can manage delegated customer subscriptions.
Typical Use Cases
Incident awareness for business-critical workloads: Teams running production applications in Azure configure Service Health alerts for the services and regions they use. When active issues occur, they receive an immediate notification and can assess whether their workloads are affected before end users report the impact.
Preparing for planned maintenance: Service Health flags planned maintenance for specific services and regions. Operations teams use this information to coordinate maintenance windows, schedule failover tests, or postpone critical deployments to a later time.
Centralized monitoring of delegated customer subscriptions: Managed service providers manage multiple customer subscriptions through Azure Lighthouse. Using Resource Health and Service Health, they keep the availability and health events of their customers in view from a central place and respond to issues before they escalate.
Benefits
- Personalized view of the health of the services and regions you actually use, rather than a generic status channel.
- Free and included with every Azure subscription, with no support plan dependency.
- Integrates into existing incident processes via Azure Monitor, webhooks, and REST API.
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you with the adoption and operation of this service.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Azure Service Health?
Azure Service Health is a free platform service that provides a personalized view of the health of the Azure services and regions you use. It comprises three components: Azure Status (the global health of all services), Service Health (the services you use), and Resource Health (the availability of individual resources). The service surfaces active service issues, planned maintenance, health advisories, and security advisories.
When should I use Azure Service Health?
Use Azure Service Health as soon as business-critical workloads run in Azure. Typical scenarios include early detection of outages affecting your subscriptions, planning around planned maintenance, and monitoring the availability of individual virtual machines or databases via Resource Health. Service providers use the service through Azure Lighthouse to keep delegated customer subscriptions in view from a central place.
How much does Azure Service Health cost?
Azure Service Health is free and included with every Azure subscription. There are no separate charges for the service, the dashboards, or the health alerts. Costs can only arise indirectly through connected actions, such as SMS notifications via Azure Monitor action groups, depending on region and provider.
How do I integrate Azure Service Health into existing incident processes?
The alerting capability is built on Azure Monitor. You create Service Health and Resource Health alerts that notify via email, SMS, mobile push, or webhook. Webhooks route events directly into ITSM and incident tools such as ServiceNow or PagerDuty. For programmatic scenarios, a REST API and Azure Resource Graph tables for Resource Health queries are available.
