Announcing GA of Advance Notifications for Azure SQL Managed Instance

[UrosMilanovic]

We are pleased to announce the GA release of Advance Notifications for Azure SQL Managed Instance.

What are advance notifications?​

Advance notifications allow you to prepare for planned maintenance events on your SQL Managed Instance resources. They alert you 24 hours before a planned maintenance event. Advance notifications work hand-in-hand with SQL Maintenance Windows – with the two combined, you gain control over when your managed instances receive updates and receive a notification ahead of time.

Why should I configure advance notifications?​

Getting advance notification can help you to efficiently prepare your system for the blips in availability associated with regular maintenance events. You can execute your pre- or post- maintenance actions either manually or set up automation.
A maintenance notification carries the information about:

• Affected region
• Affected service
• List of impacted resources
• Status of maintenance event

How do advance notifications work?​

These notifications are integrated with Service Health's planned maintenance experience and allow you to view all scheduled maintenance for your subscriptions in one place. It also helps to scale the notification to the right audience, as you may have different contacts responsible for different resources. You will receive a notification around 24 hours before the maintenance event; one when the maintenance event starts; and one as the maintenance event completes.

With maintenance notifications in place, you can leverage the Service Health portal for checking maintenance activities (planned, ongoing, completed, canceled, rescheduled), or you can configure one of the supported options for alerting and automation. An example of the alerting option is receiving an email or SMS. Automation options include triggering Azure Functions, Logic App, Webhook, Automation runbook, and more.

How do you set up advance notifications?​

To set up advance notifications you create a service health alert that will be triggered on maintenance events. Then you connect the alert to one or more action groups that are initiating the desired action. For step-by-step guidance, visit the documentation page explaining how to Configure an advance notification.

Conclusion​

In this article we announced the GA of advance notification capability that sends notice when there is a planned maintenance activity. The notice is sent 24 hours in advance, when the maintenance window opens, and once it is closed. The content of the notification brings information about affected regions, services, resources, and the status of the event.

Useful links​

Free Azure SQL Managed Instance
Advance notifications for planned maintenance events in Azure SQL Managed Instance
Maintenance window in Azure SQL Managed Instance
Service Health portal
Create activity log alerts on service notifications using the Azure portal
Azure Monitor action groups

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