Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about the process & procedure for preparing for Microsoft online services incidents (outages, for instance) and I thought it might be useful to document what guidance Microsoft provides to customers.
General Incident Guidance:
For all major service incidents, it’s highly unlikely that your account or services team will have any inside information. Below are suggestions for you to get the best info for future incidents.
Azure
Proactive guidance to prepare for service incidents:
- Azure – align critical workloads to the Well-Architected Framework.
- Install the Azure Admin mobile app for iOS and Android.
- Bookmark the Azure Service Health page and configure Service Health alerts, Resource alerts and Scheduled Events in the Azure portal.
During an incident:
- Review Service Health in the Azure portal – unless you configured notifications, in which case info will be pushed to you
- Check Azure status page if you don’t have access to the Azure portal
- Follow @AzureSupport on Twitter
- If your symptoms don’t match the incident status messages, open a support case via the Azure portal
Microsoft 365
Proactive guidance to prepare for service incidents:
- Bookmark the Service Health page in the Office 365 Admin Portal. (Docs here)
- Configure email notifications for Service Incidents
- Install the Microsoft 365 Admin mobile app for iOS and Android
- Consider configuring the Office 365 Service Communication API
During an incident:
- Review the Service Health dashboard. If your incident isn’t listed, use the Report an issue feature to report it.
Check status online via the Office 365 status page.
- Follow @MSFT365Status on Twitter
kurtsh
