Data Platform Tips 40 - Alerts for monitoring Azure SQL Database

Azure provides you the ability to send alerts when metrics on Azure services e.g. Azure SQL Database reaches a particular threshold. You will have the ability to send these alerts as emails to your administrators or invoke a web hook which in turn can do other tasks like logging a help desk ticket, push the alert to Microsoft Teams etc.

Create an alert on a metric for Azure SQL Database

a) Logon to Azure Portal.

b) Select the Azure SQL Database and click on "Alerts" under "Monitoring".

c) Click on "New Alert Rule"

d) Select the Resource (in this scenario it's Azure SQL Database) and Resource Group.

e) Add the condition you would like to monitor and trigger an alert on.

f) Select the condition to trigger alert where the average CPU time is greater than 85% with the data aggregated on a 5 minutes basis.

g) Create a new action group with the action type "Email/SMS/Push/Voice".

h) Provide the email address where the alerts needs to be sent and any other options also you would like to include along with enabling the common alert schema. (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platform/alerts-common-schema)

i) Once created, the action group click ok. You can also create more than one action group and send alerts to the appropriate alert groups.

j) Finally provide the alert name and description and also enable the Alert rule as soon as it is created.

k) Finally you can see your alert rule created as well as enabled.