Resiliency agent
The Resiliency agent helps determining appropriate fault tolerance and recovery configurations for your Azure environment. You can use the Resiliency agent to ensure that your applications and data can withstand hardware failures, datacenter outages, or other disasters. The Resiliency agent can also guide you in plugging any gaps in your backup and disaster recovery strategy.
The Resiliency agent assesses Azure resources and configurations against a set of resiliency criteria and known risk patterns. It surfaces issues and provides remediation steps:
- The Resiliency agent identifies resources that lack redundancy or backups. For example, it looks for VMs or databases that are deployed in a single availability zone or single region with no failover. If it finds a production VM that's not using availability zones or isn't part of an availability set, it flags that as a vulnerability.
- The Resiliency agent checks backup configurations. It compiles a list of important resources including VMs, SQL databases, and storage accounts that aren't being backed up by Azure Backup or an alternate backup solution. If a backup vault exists, it verifies backup jobs are running successfully and that recent backups exist.
- The Resiliency agent looks for Azure Site Recovery or other replication services for key workloads. If a VM isn't protected by Azure Site Recovery for geo-recovery, the agent suggests enabling Azure Site Recovery to a paired region. The agent also checks if geo-replication or failover groups are configured for SQL databases.
- The agent uses Azure service resiliency features and Azure Advisor's reliability recommendations to suggest improvements.
- The Resiliency agent can take action or generate scripts to improve resiliency. When the agent identifies VMs without backups, it can offer to configure an Azure Backup policy for them and deploy it.
- The agent also tracks security aspects of resiliency. For example, it checks that your backup data is secure, such as Azure Backup vaults having soft-delete enabled. It reports if a backup vault isn't following best practices. It also looks at "key alerts" that might indicate resilience issues, such as repeated backup failures or replication lag alerts and brings those to your attention.
- When an architecture changes or new components are deployed, running the Resiliency agent can quickly validate that the proper HA/DR measures are in place for those new components. The agent's checks can be integrated into CI/CD or compliance checks, ensuring every deployment meets a resiliency baseline.
The Resiliency agent continuously audits your environment's high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) posture. It uses Azure's data (like Resource Graph, backup reports, etc.) to know which resiliency measures are configured and then identifies what's missing or could be improved.