Optimizing Azure App Service Health Checks: Best Practices for High Availability

Photo by Rashtravardhan Kataria on Unsplash

In cloud environments, ensuring the health and availability of applications is essential for minimizing downtime and delivering a reliable user experience. For teams relying on Azure App Service, properly configured health checks are crucial for maintaining the balance between performance and resilience. However, default configurations may not always be optimized for every workload, and without careful adjustments, issues such as alert fatigue and prolonged downtime can arise.

This article walks through the key considerations and best practices for optimizing Azure App Service health checks, sharing insights from real-world testing and experimentation.

The Challenge: Balancing Health Checks and Performance

Azure App Service offers built-in health checks that monitor the availability and performance of app instances. These health checks determine whether an instance is healthy enough to handle traffic or if it should be marked as unhealthy and removed from the load balancer.

While this system is powerful, it can lead to some challenges if not properly configured:

• Alert Fatigue: Overly sensitive health check thresholds can generate a high volume of alerts, many of which may…