>> Did you know that you can receive notifications,
be at the Azure app, voice, e-mail,
SMS, and webhook, when
your services are impacted by an Azure service disruption?
Duke Kamstra is here to show us how we can use
Azure Monitor action groups to keep
on top of everything happening in Azure,
today on Azure Friday.
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>> Today on Azure Friday,
we're going to learn all about
Azure Monitor action groups from Duke Kamstra,
Program Manager in the Azure Monitor team.
So Duke, what would you like to talk about?
>> Today, I'd like to demonstrate a couple of things.
First of all, how we set up an action group and then second,
I want to demonstrate how we can use
action groups to get notified when Azure is having an outage.
So pretty important scenario and
we'd like everybody to be aware of that.
>> Okay.
>> Sound good?
>> Yes.
>> All right. So here I am in the Azure portal,
and I'm going to go ahead and set
up an action group the way I find
the action groups user experience as I go to "Monitor."
So the Azure Monitor blade,
and then I choose "Alerts."
Then up here, I have a "Manage action groups" button,
so I'm going to go ahead and click that,
and you can see I've been using
them a lot but I'll go ahead and create a new action group.
I need to give it a name.
So let's see, we're at Channel 9 today,
so I'll call it Channel9Demo.
I will give it a short name.
More on why we do that later.
I created a resource group
earlier for the Channel9Demo, so I'm going to store it.
The action group is actually an arm resource,
I need to put it in a resource group,
and now, I'm going to define some actions.
These action names, these are basically
my friendly reminders of what's inside the action definition.
So for example, Dukes,
let's see numbers, and I will go
ahead and here you can see
the different kinds of actions we support.
So e-mail, SMS, push notifications to the Azure app,
voice, we can actually invoke an Azure Function,
or a Logic App, call your webhook, even calling ITSM,
for example, ServiceNow [inaudible] or execute an automation runbook.
So these are all the different action types I have.
I'll go ahead and set up
this e-mail push stuff and I'll go ahead and say hey,
send me an e-mail whenever this action is triggered.
Also, we just recently released
the capability to just specify an arm group,
so an unarmed role.
So for example, you could send this action or this notification to
all the members of
your Azure subscription owner role or more interestingly,
the monitoring contributor role.
So that's our current recommendation is,
hey the folks that want to know about
what alerts are triggering and the monitoring system,
go ahead and add them to the monitor role, and here,
I can specify all those folks
and they will all get the notification.
Then what we do is look in the role,
grab everybody's e-mail addresses, and send them an e-mail.
>> So this itself,
this is just what you want to happen
if something else just triggers this action?
>> Correct.
>> Okay.
>> What I'm saying here is
when the alert that calls this action fires,
send an e-mail to all of these people.
>> Perfect.
>> We also support SMS.
This is pretty popular.
We've got a bunch of country codes that we support,
I think 16 of them.
So I could go ahead and put my phone number in here.
The interesting thing about e-mail addresses and
SMS is they run on what we call dial tone.
So if Azure is down,
we are still able to send you an e-mail
or send an SMS to you or for that matter, make a phone call.
Whereas these other actions
that take a direct dependency on Azure,
if that part of Azure is down,
that notification won't work.
>> Well, that would make a lot of sense.
>> Yeah. Azure app, I want to highlight Azure app.
So if you have it installed the Azure app,
I highly recommend that you do and you
can get push notifications there.
It's very popular for folks that don't want to pay for SMS,
they'd rather use their data plan.
Then finally, voice. Not very popular feature honestly
because none of us like to get woken up at
Three O'clock in the morning by a voice call from Azure.
>> Okay.
>> All right. So I'll go ahead and let's see, turn that off.
I'll go ahead and save the setting and now,
I have my personal phone numbers basically.
Similarly, I could go ahead and set up a webhook,
and webhooks are just HTTP endpoints.
So you, as the customer,
set up some sort of HTTP endpoint.
It could be any sort of code that
exposes an HTTP endpoint and you just specify
that endpoint in the action
and every time this action group is called,
we will send the payload to that HTTP endpoint and
then you can write code that
processes that data and does the right thing.
>> Okay.
>> So there we go.
We've set up a couple of actions.
As I mentioned before,
I can also use Functions,
Logic Apps, ITSM, and runbooks.
>> So more than just notifying,
you can actually just go take action and tell you,
by the way, I did this thing?
>> Exactly. So a runbook for example,
you could automatically mitigate.
Look at the data, say, "Ah, you know what?
I need to reboot that VM," and
go ahead and use a runbook to reboot it.
So auto mitigation of a potential issue.
I want to point out that this action group,
I can use it in as many alerts as I want.
I don't have to go into every alert and define a new list.
Once again, put in my e-mail address.
Once again, put in my webhook address.
This is a reusable component.
So I'll go ahead and save it, and now,
I'm going to show you how I might use that.
So I'm going to pop over to the service "Health alerts" blade,
and this is where you as the customer
could come in and find out what's going on,
what does Azure telling me about the availability of Azure.
Could be outages, could be planned maintenance that's coming,
or just information what we call health advisories,
just information you should be aware of to successfully use Azure.
My favorite example is hey,
we're deprecating some SDK version today.
We're going to do it in a year, but
you should be aware because it may
take you a while to accommodate that change.
So I'm going to go ahead into "Health alerts"
and I'm going to say create a service health alert.
A service health alert is what we call the
alert that is monitoring
the service health communications coming from the Azure platform.
So when we discover that an outage is going on,
has customer impact, we will let the subscription.
We will send a notification to
the subscriptions that we believe are impacted.
>> If you have subscribe to that as-
>> As an alert, then you will be notified.
>> Okay.
>> Via the action croup, exactly.
So I'm just going to make it easy here.
I'm going to say, all regions, all services,
so this is all the stuff that you might use in Azure.
There are three different forms of alert,
there are service issues,
aka outages, there are planned maintenance,
and health advisories, so I'll just say everything.
I want all of it, and then down here-
>> Then unplanned maintenance, before you go any further,
unplanned maintenance is that
when they notify you that it will be happening?
>> Yeah. They actually tell you it's coming.
>> So you can take preventative action when you get notified?
>> Exactly. So in the planned maintenance,
they say this is the plan schedule for the maintenance,
and then when it starts,
we send another notification saying it has started.
If we have to reschedule,
we will tell you hey, it's rescheduled or canceled.
>> Great.
>> So yeah, the planned maintenance,
it's highly recommend that you subscribe to that.
Again, I pop over to my list of action groups and say,
there's my Channel9Demo action group.
So that's what we'll get executed when this alert is triggered.
So my service health alerts
and today, let's see.
Go ahead and I'm not going to
enable it because I already have one of these, trust me.
I go ahead and up. I've got to put it in a resource group.
The alerts are resources as well,
so I need to put it in a resource group,
and there you go. Now, I have an alert.
So the next time Azure sends me a notification that
my subscription is being impacted by many of them or whatever,
those actions that I define will get executed.
>> That's fantastic.
>> There you go.
>> Is there anything more you want to show us?
>> No, not today. That's what I wanted to highlight.
>> Where would we go to learn more?
>>The Azure Documentation site.
So azure.com and search for service health alerts or action group.
Either one will will pop up the documentation
on configuring a service health alert
or specifically configuring an action group.
Any other thing? I think I've covered it all.
>> Great. Thanks again,
it was really great to hear all about action groups.
>> My pleasure. My pleasure, happy to be here.
>> We've been learning all about
Azure Monitor action groups today on Azure Friday.
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