Flash permits speedy detection of points originating from the Azure platform, serving to groups reply shortly to infrastructure-related disruptions.
Beforehand, we shared an replace on Venture Flash as a part of our Advancing Reliability weblog collection, reaffirming our dedication to serving to Azure clients detect and diagnose digital machine (VM) availability points with velocity and precision. This 12 months, we’re excited to unveil the most recent improvements that take VM availability monitoring to the following degree—enabling clients to function their workloads on Azure with even higher confidence. I’ve requested Yingqi (Halley) Ding, Technical Program Supervisor from the Azure Core Compute crew, to stroll us by means of the most recent investments powering the following section of Venture Flash.
— Mark Russinovich, CTO, Deputy CISO, and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure.
Venture Flash is a cross-division initiative at Microsoft. Its imaginative and prescient is to ship exact telemetry, real-time alerts, and scalable monitoring—all inside a unified, user-friendly expertise designed to satisfy the various observability wants of digital machine (VM) availability.
Flash addresses each platform-level and user-level challenges. It permits speedy detection of points originating from the Azure platform, serving to groups reply shortly to infrastructure-related disruptions. On the identical time, it equips you with actionable insights to diagnose and resolve issues inside your individual atmosphere. This twin functionality helps excessive availability and helps guarantee what you are promoting Service-Degree Agreements are persistently met. It’s our mission to make sure you can:
- Achieve clear visibility into disruptions, akin to VM reboots and restarts, software freezes as a result of community driver updates, and 30-second host OS updates—with detailed insights into what occurred, why it occurred, and whether or not it was deliberate or surprising.
- Analyze developments and set alerts to hurry up debugging and monitor availability over time.
- Monitor at scale and construct customized dashboards to remain on prime of the well being of all assets.
- Obtain automated root trigger analyses (RCAs) that designate which VMs had been affected, what precipitated the problem, how lengthy it lasted, and what was accomplished to repair it.
- Obtain real-time notifications for essential occasions, akin to degraded nodes requiring VM redeployment, platform-initiated service therapeutic, or in-place reboots triggered by {hardware} points—empowering your groups to reply swiftly and decrease person influence.
- Adapt restoration insurance policies dynamically to satisfy altering workload wants and enterprise priorities.
Throughout our crew’s journey with Flash, it has garnered widespread adoption from a few of the world’s main corporations spanning from e-commerce, gaming, finance, hedge funds, and plenty of different sectors. Their in depth utilization of Flash underscores its effectiveness and worth in assembly the various wants of high-profile organizations.
At BlackRock, VM reliability is essential to our operations. If a VM is working on degraded {hardware}, we need to be alerted shortly so we’ve the utmost alternative to mitigate the problem earlier than it impacts customers. With Venture Flash, we obtain a useful resource well being occasion built-in into our alerting processes the second an underlying node in Azure infrastructure is marked unallocatable, usually as a result of well being degradation. Our infrastructure crew then schedules a migration of the affected useful resource to wholesome {hardware} at an optimum time. This capacity to predictively keep away from abrupt VM failures has diminished our VM interruption price and improved the general reliability of our funding platform.
— Eli Hamburger, Head of Infrastructure Internet hosting, BlackRock.
Suite of options obtainable as we speak
The Flash initiative has advanced into a sturdy, scalable monitoring framework designed to satisfy the various wants of contemporary infrastructure—whether or not you’re managing a handful of VMs or working at huge scale. Constructed with reliability at its core, Flash empowers you to observe what issues most, utilizing the instruments and telemetry that align together with your structure and operational mannequin.
Flash publishes VM availability states and useful resource well being annotations for detailed failure attribution and downtime evaluation. The information beneath outlines your choices so you possibly can select the fitting Flash monitoring resolution on your situation.
| Answer | Description |
| Azure Useful resource Graph (normal availability) | For investigations at scale, centralized useful resource repositories, and historic lookups, you possibly can periodically devour useful resource availability telemetry throughout all workloads directly utilizing Azure Useful resource Graph (ARG). |
| Occasion Grid system matter (public preview) | To set off time-sensitive and important mitigations, akin to redeploying or restarting VMs to forestall end-user influence, you possibly can obtain alerts inside seconds of essential modifications in useful resource availability through Occasion Handlers in Occasion Grid. |
| Azure Monitor – Metrics (public preview) | To trace developments, mixture platform metrics (e.g., CPU, disk), and configure exact threshold-based alerts, you possibly can devour an out-of-the-box VM availability metric through Azure Monitor. |
| Useful resource Well being (normal availability) | To carry out instantaneous and handy per-resource well being checks within the Portal UI, you possibly can shortly view the RHC blade. You can too entry a 30-day historic view of well being checks for that useful resource to assist quick and efficient troubleshooting. |
What’s new?
Public preview: Person vs platform dimension launched for VM availability metric
Many purchasers have emphasised the necessity for user-friendly monitoring options that present real-time, scalable entry to compute useful resource availability information. This data is important for triggering well timed mitigation actions in response to availability modifications.
Designed to fulfill this essential want, the VM availability metric is well-suited for monitoring developments, aggregating platform metrics (akin to CPU and disk utilization), and configuring exact threshold-based alerts. You possibly can make the most of this out-of-the-box VM availability metric in Azure Monitor.
Now you need to use the Context dimension to establish whether or not VM availability was influenced by Azure or user-orchestrated exercise. This dimension signifies, throughout any disruption or when the metric drops to zero, whether or not the trigger was platform-triggered or user-driven. It could possibly assume values of Platform, Buyer, or Unknown.
The brand new dimension can be supported in Azure Monitor alert guidelines as a part of the filtering course of.
Public preview: Allow sending well being assets occasions to Azure Monitor alerts in Occasion Grid
Azure Occasion Grid is a extremely scalable, totally managed Pub/Sub message distribution service that provides versatile message consumption patterns. Occasion Grid allows you to publish and subscribe to messages to assist Web of Issues (IoT) options. By HTTP, Occasion Grid allows you to construct event-driven options, the place a writer service (akin to Venture Flash) declares its system state modifications (occasions) to subscriber purposes.
With the combination of Azure Monitor alerts as a brand new occasion handler, now you can obtain low-latency notifications—akin to VM availability modifications and detailed annotations—through SMS, e mail, push notifications, and extra. This combines Occasion Grid’s close to real-time supply with Azure Monitor’s direct alerting capabilities.
To get began, merely comply with the step-by-step directions and start receiving real-time alerts with Flash’s new providing.
What’s subsequent?
Wanting forward, we plan to broaden our focus to incorporate situations akin to inoperable top-of-rack switches, failures in accelerated networking, and new courses of {hardware} failure prediction. As well as, we purpose to proceed enhancing information high quality and consistency throughout all Flash endpoints—enabling extra correct downtime attribution and deeper visibility into VM availability.
For complete monitoring of VM availability—together with situations akin to routine upkeep, dwell migration, service therapeutic, and degradation—we suggest leveraging each Flash Well being occasions and Scheduled Occasions (SE).
- Flash Well being occasions supply real-time insights into ongoing and historic availability disruptions, together with VM degradation. This facilitates efficient downtime administration, helps automated mitigation methods, and enhances root trigger evaluation.
- Scheduled Occasions, in distinction, present as much as quarter-hour of advance discover previous to deliberate upkeep, enabling proactive decision-making and preparation. Throughout this window, you might select to acknowledge the occasion or defer actions primarily based in your operational readiness.
For upcoming updates on the Flash initiative, we encourage you to comply with the advancing reliability collection!
