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Use a webhook to configure health notifications for problem management systems

  • Article
  • 2 minutes to read

This article shows you how to configure Azure Service Health alerts to send data through webhooks to your existing notification system.

You can configure Service Health alerts to notify you by text message or email when an Azure service incident affects you.

But you might already have an existing external notification system in place that you prefer to use. This article identifies the most important parts of the webhook payload. And it describes how to create custom alerts to notify you when relevant service issues occur.

If you want to use a preconfigured integration, see:

Watch an introductory video:

Configure a custom notification by using the Service Health webhook payload

To set up your own custom webhook integration, you need to parse the JSON payload that's sent via Service Health notification.

See an example ServiceHealth webhook payload.

You can confirm that it's a service health alert by looking at context.eventSource == "ServiceHealth". The following properties are the most relevant:

  • data.context.activityLog.status
  • data.context.activityLog.level
  • data.context.activityLog.subscriptionId
  • data.context.activityLog.properties.title
  • data.context.activityLog.properties.impactStartTime
  • data.context.activityLog.properties.communication
  • data.context.activityLog.properties.impactedServices
  • data.context.activityLog.properties.trackingId

You can create a direct link to your Service Health dashboard on a desktop or mobile device by generating a specialized URL. Use the trackingId and the first three and last three digits of your subscriptionId in this format:

https://app.azure.com/h/<trackingId>/<first three and last three digits of subscriptionId>

For example, if your subscriptionId is bba14129-e895-429b-8809-278e836ecdb3 and your trackingId is 0DET-URB, your Service Health URL is:

https://app.azure.com/h/0DET-URB/bbadb3

Use the level to detect the severity of the issue

From lowest to highest severity, the level property in the payload can be Informational, Warning, Error, or Critical.

Parse the impacted services to determine the incident scope

Service Health alerts can inform you about issues across multiple regions and services. To get complete details, you need to parse the value of impactedServices.

The content that's inside is an escaped JSON string that, when unescaped, contains another JSON object that can be parsed regularly. For example:

{"data.context.activityLog.properties.impactedServices": "[{\"ImpactedRegions\":[{\"RegionName\":\"Australia East\"},{\"RegionName\":\"Australia Southeast\"}],\"ServiceName\":\"Alerts & Metrics\"},{\"ImpactedRegions\":[{\"RegionName\":\"Australia Southeast\"}],\"ServiceName\":\"App Service\"}]"}

becomes:

[
   {
      "ImpactedRegions":[
         {
            "RegionName":"Australia East"
         },
         {
            "RegionName":"Australia Southeast"
         }
      ],
      "ServiceName":"Alerts & Metrics"
   },
   {
      "ImpactedRegions":[
         {
            "RegionName":"Australia Southeast"
         }
      ],
      "ServiceName":"App Service"
   }
]

This example shows problems for:

  • "Alerts & Metrics" in Australia East and Australia Southeast.
  • "App Service" in Australia Southeast.

Test your webhook integration via an HTTP POST request

Follow these steps:

  1. Create the service health payload that you want to send. See an example service health webhook payload at Webhooks for Azure activity log alerts.

  2. Create an HTTP POST request as follows:

    POST        https://your.webhook.endpoint

HEADERS     Content-Type: application/json

BODY        <service health payload>

    You should receive a "2XX - Successful" response.

  3. Go to PagerDuty to confirm that your integration was set up successfully.

Next steps