The Reliability pillar of the Azure Well-Architected Framework is designed to help you build and operate reliable workloads in Azure. One of the key ways to ensure reliability is to perform proper testing and monitoring.

Testing

Testing is essential for ensuring that your workload will behave as expected under various conditions, including failures. Some of the key tests that you should perform include:

  • Failover and failback testing: Test your failover and failback procedures to ensure that your workload can recover from a failure promptly.
  • Health probes: Implement health probes to monitor the health of your workload components. This will help you to identify and address any problems before they cause an outage.
  • Network traffic monitoring: Monitor your network traffic to identify any potential problems, such as network congestion or DDoS attacks.
  • Autoscaling testing: Test your autoscaling capabilities to ensure that your workload can scale up and down to meet demand.
  • Load testing: Perform load testing to simulate real-world traffic conditions and identify any performance bottlenecks.
  • Chaos engineering: Use chaos engineering to deliberately inject failures into your system to test its resilience.

Monitoring

Once you have tested your workload, it is important to implement monitoring to identify and address any problems that occur in production. Some of the key metrics that you should monitor include:

  • Resource health: Use Azure Resource Health events to alert on resource health events.
  • Service health: Use Azure Service Health events to alert on applicable Service level events.
  • Application health: Use health probes to monitor the health of your application components and compound application health.
  • Performance metrics: Monitor key performance metrics, such as response time and throughput, to identify any performance problems.
  • Error rates: Monitor error rates to identify any problems with your workload.

By following these recommendations, you can help to ensure the reliability of your Azure workloads.

Example

Here is an example of how you can use testing and monitoring to ensure the reliability of an Azure workload:

  • You have developed a web application that is hosted on Azure App Service.
  • Implemented a failover and failback strategy using Azure Traffic Manager.
  • Configured health probes to monitor the health of your App Service instances.
  • You have configured Azure Network Monitor or a third-party Monitoring solution to monitor your network traffic.
  • You have configured Azure Application Insights to monitor the health and performance of your web application.

Perform test to make sure the application is reliable:

  • Test your failover and failback procedures by manually failing over one of your App Service instances. You verify that the traffic is automatically routed to the healthy instance.
  • Periodically test your health probes to ensure that they are working properly.
  • Monitor your network traffic for any potential problems.
  • Perform load testing to simulate real-world traffic conditions and identify any performance bottlenecks.

Implement Continues monitoring:

  • Configure Azure Resource Health events to alert you on any resource health events.
  • Use Azure Service Health events to alert you on any applicable Service level events.
  • Setup Application Insights to alert you on any performance problems or errors.

By following these steps, you have helped to ensure the reliability of your Azure web application.

Testing and monitoring are essential for ensuring the reliability of your Azure workloads. By following the recommendations in this blog post, you can help to ensure that your workloads are resilient to failures and that they can meet the needs of your users.