Cost to receive service health alert notifications

Question

What is the cost to receive SMS alerts for service health notifications?

According to the documentation at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/alerts-activity-log-service-notifications-portal?toc=%2Fazure%2Fservice-health%2Ftoc.json#create-service-health-alert-using-azure-portal, I need to setup a "health alert" with an "action group".

According to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/monitor/, there is a charge for Notifications sent based on when an Alert rule triggers.

According to the FAQs in https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/monitor/, "Activity log, service health and resource health alert rules continue to be available at no charge."
However, it also says "Alert notifications are charged separately based on the type of notification used."

Will I be charged for SMSs sent for service health alerts? Is there a limit on the max number of target phone numbers I can use for this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Service Health refers to notifications of platform outages. For example, if a regional datacenter was degraded. I would expect that Service Health and Activity logs monitoring are free all up based on past experience. I could be wrong and agree that the wording on the pricing page is somewhat unclear. Often testing is the best way to verify.

Answer 2

As you mentioned there is a modest charge for alert rules depending on the rule type. The exception is alert rules based on the activity log (this is free).

There are additional charges in Azure for the notifications and SMS/voice messages.

If you use SMS to text a user, they may incur a charge from their cell provider for incoming text messages.

Service limits: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/service-limits

10 SMS actions in an action group.
No more than 1 SMS message every 5 minutes.

Answer 3

I would recommend the below article, which summarizes the differences between Azure Monitor and Azure Service health:

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-s-the-difference-between-azure-monitor-and-azure-service-health/

In a nutshell: Is it Azure or is it me?

If it is Azure/Microsoft's platform, then monitoring/alerting is free via Azure Service health.

If we want to monitor/alert on our resources, then there are cost and limits associated with Azure Monitor:

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/monitor/
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/service-limits

Azure Service Health and Azure Monitor have similar (if not the same) alerting platform: they both use the same alert definition workflow and leverage the same action rules and groups. This means that we can set up an action group once and use it multiple times for different scenarios.