Routing Azure alerts to on-call teams and incident management with Zenduty

Azure Monitor notifies you about Azure service incidents and planned maintenance so you can take action to mitigate downtime. Azure Monitor allows you to configure customizable cloud alerts and use your personalized dashboard to analyze health issues and monitor the impact on your cloud resources. However, during critical service downtimes where you need to involve multiple engineers to resolve the incident, you require an on-call scheduling and alerting service with co-ordinated incident response capabilities. This is where a lot of Azure users use Zenduty.

Zenduty enables rapid response to Azure downtime incidents

Zenduty allows you to route critical alerts from different components within your Azure infrastructure to the right teams and individuals within your organization. Zenduty dispatches alerts to the relevant on-call teams through SMS, Phone(Voice), Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Android/iOS push notifications and escalates those alerts that are not responded to within SLA timeframes to other engineers within the team, thereby ensuring that the incident is responded to quickly.

Setting up on-call schedules and escalation policies in Zenduty

Start by creating a free account on Zenduty.

Create a team and add other engineers who will be part of the on-call rotation for receiving Azure-related incident alerts. Add your contact methods — SMS, Phone, Microsoft Teams, Email, Android/iOS where Zenduty will notify you.

Create multiple on-call schedules within your team. One for the primary on-call, and the other for secondary(backup) on call.

Setup the escalation policy which will define who should be alerted first, who should be alerted second, and so on.

Setting up the Azure Zenduty integration

Setup a service within your team and add the Azure integration and then configure the Azure integration with Zenduty. Mao the service to the escalation policy created earlier.

Once done, Zenduty will escalate all incident alerts through the escalation policy whenever Azure monitor detects that one of the metrics has crossed its threshold.

Alerts, Escalations, and Responders

Manage your entire Azure incident end-to-end from Microsost Teams. Assign incident to specific service owners. Add subject matter experts and stakeholders into the incident response. Customize incident priority and SLA and add incident notes for future use. Zenduty automates the creation of your incident communications channels like Jira tickets, Teams/Zoom rooms and conference bridges.

Visualize the entire incident timeline

Minimize the mean times to response and resolution

Teams that use Zenduty to manage Azure service incidents have successfully reduced their response times by 80% and resolution times by 60%. Zenduty provides a frictionless path to incident resolution and makes sure that your incident responders are organized and communications are streamlined.

If you’re deployed on Azure and are looking to implement on-call scheduling, incident escalations and a solid incident response pipeline, try out Zenduty’s free 14-day trial. For detailed product walkthroughs, visit our Youtube Channel for more.