What should I do if I suspect that one of Azure Services is not available or there is a quality degradation?

This post will be short and I will try to response to the following question:

What should I do if I suspect that one of Azure Services is not available or there is a quality degradation?

Checklist:

1. Check Azure Status (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status)

You will be able to find in real time information related to interruption and service degradation at world wide level. All the issues and problem are reported on this page. In this way you can know if there are (known) issues on Azure.

2. Check Azure Portal for Alerts

The new portal will notified you about different issues that can appear in the system. For example when you reach a limitation of your service (throughput) you will be notified about it (before reaching it). Don't forget that you can redirect this alerts on your email.

3. Check your service instance status on Azure Portal

At this step you want to be sure that your service status is green and the configuration is good. I had situations when somebody reset the access configuration or change a configuration without notify all the teams that are impacted and make a double check.

4. Check Azure Audit Logs

You might be surprised to find out that you can find very useful information about what happen in the system.

5. Check your inbox (operations)

When the services that you are using are impacted by different operations that are done on Azure, you will be notified in advance. It is simple to miss this kind of information. For example that a major update will be done on specific VMs and you might be impacted (when you have don't have redundancy).

6. Check your inbox (notifications)

It is so easy to miss an email that notifies you that you have problem with the credit card that is connected to your Azure Subscription or situations like this. I remember one time when our credit card expired and we missed the email that notified us that in the last 3m payment was not done.

7. Open a support ticket

You can any time to open a support ticket. But, before doing this you should be 100% sure that the problem is not from your side. I'm happy to say that until now all the time the issues were because of us (when Azure Status was green) and not from Azure.

In this post I didn't talked about what you can do monitor your system. That is a long and complex story that I might write in future.

You should remember to:

Check Azure Status
Check Azure Portal
Check your Email

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