Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Monitor health models

Troubleshooting modern cloud-native workloads has become increasingly complex. As applications scale across distributed services and regions, pinpointing the root cause of performance degradation or outages often requires navigating a maze of disconnected signals, metrics, and alerts. This fragmented experience slows down troubleshooting and burdens engineering teams with manual correlation work. 

We address these challenges by introducing a unified, intelligent concept of workload health that’s enriched with application context. Health models streamline how you monitor, assess, and respond to issues affecting your workloads. Built on Azure Service Groups, they provide an out-of-the-box model tailored to your environment, consolidate signals to reduce alert noise, and surface actionable insights — all designed to accelerate detection, diagnosis, and resolution across your Azure landscape.

Overview 

Azure Monitor health models enable customers to monitor the health of their applications with ease and confidence. These models use the Azure-wide workload concept of Service Groups to infer the scope of workloads and provide out-of-the-box health criteria based on platform metrics for Azure resources. 

Key Capabilities 

Out-of-the-Box Health Model 

Customers often struggle with defining and monitoring the health of their workloads due to the variability of metrics across different Azure resources. Azure Monitor health models provide a simplified out-of-the-box health experience built using Azure Service Group membership. Customers can define the scope of their workload using Service Groups and receive default health criteria based on platform metrics. This includes recommended alert rules for various Azure resources, ensuring comprehensive monitoring coverage. 

Improved Detection of Workload Issues 

Isolating the root cause of workload issues can be time-consuming and challenging, especially when dealing with multiple signals from various resources. The health model aggregates health signals across the model to generate a single health notification, helping customers isolate the type of signal that became unhealthy. This enables quick identification of whether the issue is related to backend services or user-centric signals. 

Quick Impact Assessment 

Assessing the impact of workload issues across different regions and resources can be complex and slow, leading to delayed responses and prolonged downtime. The health model provides insights into which Azure resources or components have become unhealthy, which regions are affected, and the duration of the impact based on health history. This allows customers to quickly assess the scope and severity of issues within the workload. 

Localize the Issue 

Identifying the specific signals and resources that triggered a health state change can be difficult, leading to inefficient troubleshooting and resolution processes. Health models inform customers which signals triggered the health state change, and which Service Group members were affected. This enables quick isolation of the trouble source and notifies the relevant team, streamlining the troubleshooting process. 

Customizable Health Criteria for Bespoke Workloads 

Many organizations operate complex, bespoke workloads that require their own specific health definitions. Relying solely on default platform metrics can lead to blind spots or false positives, making it difficult to accurately assess the true health of these custom applications. Azure Monitor health models allow customers to tailor health assessments by adding custom health signals. These signals can be sourced from Azure Monitor data such as Application Insights, Managed Prometheus, and Log Analytics. This flexibility empowers teams to tune the health model to reflect the unique characteristics and performance indicators of their workloads, ensuring more precise and actionable health insights. 

Getting Started 

Ready to simplify and accelerate how you monitor the health of your workloads? Getting started with Azure Monitor health models is easy — and during the public preview, it’s completely free to use. Pricing details will be shared ahead of general availability (GA), so you can plan with confidence. 

Start Monitoring in Minutes 

1. Define Your Service Group 
   Create your Service Group and add the relevant resources as members to the Service Group. If you don’t yet have access to Service Groups, you can join here.  
   
   
2. Create Your Health Model
   In the Azure Portal navigate to Health Models and create your first model. You’ll get out-of-the-box health criteria automatically applied.
   
   
3. Customize to Fit Your Needs
   In many cases the default health signals may suit your needs, but we support customization as well.  
   
   
4. Investigate and Act
   Use the health timeline and our alerting integration to quickly assess impact, isolate issues, and take action — all from a single pane of glass. 

We are targeted to go live in mid-June, at which point you can find us in the portal and our documentation will be published under the Azure Monitor documentation area. 

We Want to Hear From You 

Azure Monitor health models are built with our customers in mind — and your feedback is essential to shaping the future of this experience. Whether you're using the out-of-the-box health model or customizing it to fit your unique workloads, we want to know what’s working well and where we can improve. 

Share Your Feedback 

• Use the “Give Feedback” feature directly within the Azure Monitor health models experience to send us your thoughts in context. 

• Post your ideas in the Azure Monitor community. 

• Prefer email? Reach out to us at [email protected] — we’re listening. 

Your insights help us prioritize features, improve usability, and ensure Azure Monitor continues to meet the evolving needs of modern cloud-native operations.