Azure Monitor is a powerful tool that can help you keep track of the performance and health of your Azure resources. One of its most useful features is the ability to set up alerts that notify you when certain conditions are met. However, in order to make the most of this feature, it’s important to follow some best practices when configuring your alerts.

1. Be specific with your alerts: When setting up alerts, it’s important to be as specific as possible. This means identifying the exact resource or metric that you want to monitor, as well as the specific condition that should trigger the alert. For example, instead of setting up a general alert for “high CPU usage,” set up an alert specifically for “CPU usage on WebApp1 exceeds 80% for 15 minutes.”
2. Use alert suppression: In some cases, you may not want to receive alerts for certain conditions. For example, you may want to suppress alerts during maintenance periods or when you know that a particular resource is experiencing high load. Azure Monitor allows you to suppress alerts based on specific conditions, such as time of day or the presence of specific keywords in the alert description. For example, you can suppress alerts during non-business hours by setting the suppression time to outside of your business hours.
3. Use action groups: Azure Monitor alerts can be configured to take a number of different actions when triggered, such as sending an email, creating a ticket in a service management system or even triggering an automation runbook. To make the most of this feature, it’s a good idea to create action groups that group together different actions for different types of alerts. For example, you can create an action group for critical alerts that sends an email to the on-call engineer, creates a ticket in your service management system and triggers an automation runbook to perform a specific action.
4. Test your alerts: Before you start using your alerts in production, it’s a good idea to test them to make sure that they are configured correctly. You can do this by manually triggering the alert and verifying that the correct actions are taken. For example, you can test your alert by temporarily setting the threshold to a lower value and then verifying that the alert is triggered and the correct action is taken.
5. Monitor your alerts: Once your alerts are set up, it’s important to keep an eye on them to make sure that they are working as expected. You can do this by monitoring the alert history in the Azure portal, which shows you a record of all alerts that have been triggered and the actions that were taken in response. This will help you to identify any potential issues with your alerts and make any necessary adjustments.

By following these best practices, you can ensure that your Azure Monitor alerts are configured correctly and that they will help you quickly identify and resolve any issues with your Azure resources. By being specific, using alert suppression, action groups, testing the alerts and monitoring them you can make the most out of Azure Monitor alerts and have a more reliable monitoring system.

Note: There are some great example of how to create alerts using JSON templates available here.