Azure SQL Database is the modern cloud-based relational database service to power a wide variety of applications including mission critical, resource-intensive and the latest generative AI applications. Azure SQL Database provides industry leading availability SLA of 99.99%. We know customers want to monitor the availability of critical Azure services like Azure SQL Database in a granular, consistent way and in near real time with high quality data.
We are pleased to announce the general availability of the Availability metric for Azure SQL DB enabling you to monitor SLA-compliant availability. This Azure monitor metric is at a 1-minute frequency storing up to 93 days. Typically, the latency to display availability is less than three minutes. You can visualize the metric in Azure monitor and set up alerts too.
Availability is determined based on the database being operational for connections. A minute is considered as downtime or unavailable for a given database if all continuous attempts by the customer to establish a connection to the database within the minute fail. If there is intermittent unavailability, the duration of continuous unavailability must exceed the one-minute threshold to be considered as downtime.
Availability metric data is applicable for a database in DTU or vCore purchasing model and in all the service tiers (Basic, Standard, Premium, General Purpose, Business Critical & Hyperscale). Both singleton and elastic pool deployments are supported. You can monitor the metric by adding Availability metric in the portal as shown below:
If your database is configured to send Metrics to Log Analytics under “Diagnostic settings”, you can also query the Availability metric data as shown below:
For comprehensive details on Availability metric like the logic used for computing availability please refer to documentation. To learn more of Azure SQL Database Service Level Agreements (SLA) refer to SLA.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the “Availability” metric?
It is a metric available in Azure Portal to track SLA-compliant availability at an individual SQL Database level. - What does SLA-compliant mean?
Being SLA-compliant involves the following:
- Availability is determined based on the database being operational for connections.
- A minute is considered unavailable for a given database if all continuous attempts by customer to establish a connection to the database within the minute fail.
- In the case of intermittent unavailability, the duration of continuous unavailability must exceed the one-minute threshold to be considered as downtime.
- How do you view the metric in the portal?
In the Azure portal, select your SQL database and under “Monitoring”, select “Metrics”. In the “Metric” dropdown, choose “Availability”. - What is the granularity of the Availability metric?
One minute. - What are the possible values for the Availability metric for each one-minute data point?
Possible values are either 100% or 0. - Can I use Azure Monitor to centrally monitor and configure alerts for the Availability metric?
Yes - How is the downtime minute boundary aligned?
It is aligned to wall clock time for example 9:00 or 9:01. - Is the Availability metric also presented for the read-only replica of a Business Critical tier database?
No. - Is the Availability metric also presented for Hyperscale Named Replicas?
Yes. - Does the Availability metric support private link connections?
Yes. - Does the Availability metric support both proxy and redirect connection policies?
Yes, both are supported. - What data does the Availability metric show in cases of an outage?
When no connection activity to the database is observed, the Availability metric will show 100%. Availability shows 0 when only failed connections are observed for the entire minute. Depending on the type of outage, connection activity may or may not be observed.
Updated Feb 27, 2025
Version 1.0
mhyon
Microsoft
Microsoft
