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Azure Status - Real time information about Azure Services Health Status

Last week I had the opportunity to talk with some people that started to take into consideration cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Even if the services and SLA’s were very clear for them, there was a thing that was not clear from them:
How can I know when a service offered by Azure is down? How can I know if the SLA is respected or not (99.9X %)?
They thought that Microsoft is the same as 10 years ago and they don’t share with customers this kind of information.
For them it was a surprise to discover the Current Health Azure Dashboard aka Azure Status and how easy you can see the status of all the services around the globe. In real time you can see the status of each services from all datacenter that are available.
On top of this, on this dashboard you have a History section that can be used to see what services had issues and what was the cause. In this way, all the clients around the world can know exactly what happen when a specific service was down.
Hint: There is a RSS feed for each service. You can use it to integrate this status on your own system/aggregator.
Additional to this portal, customer should know that if an issue of one of Azure services is affecting their services, they are usually notify by support team as soon as possible via email.
If you want to know exactly what is the SLA for different Azure services you should check the following page http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/. On this page there are listed all the SLA for all available services. Even if you are a small customer, you will have the same SLA like the big ones. In this moment there are 2 services available that has 4 nines (99.99%) – Traffic Manager and Storage.
Another sources of Azure Status (that are not provided by Microsoft, but aggregates information from Azure services) are:


Unfortunately, in this moment you will not be able to find a portal that can gives you the uptime history for different Azure services. For example in the last 12 month the uptime for Y service was 99.999%.

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