Azure Front Door: Intelligent Health Probe Monitoring

Azure Front Door is in simple a Front Door to all your applications. Once a request is entered through Front Door, it travels through Microsoft's global edge network. It has many capabilities, but in this post, we are going to have a look at how easy it is to set up Health Probe Monitoring in Azure Front Door and how Azure Front Door handles unhealthy Backends.

As always it's easy to go by a demo.

I have deployed a very simple web application as an Azure App Service in two regions, one in Australia Southeast and the other in East US 2. (I am using 2 regions because Front Door is resilient to failures to an entire Azure region unlike Azure Application Gateway). This web application exposes /health endpoint, which the Azure Front will use to monitor the health.

And I have an Azure Front Door created and added a single backend pool with my two App Services.

Update Backend Pool

For my backends, their priority and weight are configured to be equal. Since I am in New Zealand, the closest region to me out of my two regions is Australia Southeast. So when I access the Front Door, I will be served from my App Service running in Australia Southeast (Read more: Front Door routing methods)

Served from Australia Southeast

And for some reason, if my App Service in Australia Southeast is down (can be an Application issue or can be a serious issue like Azure App Services in Australia Southeast region is down) and then I will be served from a different backend (determined by Front Door routing methods)

Served from East US 2

All these are handled by Azure Front Door with the very little configuration I have shown above (highlighted in red and green in the first image).

To determine the health and proximity of each backend, the Front Door periodically sends an HTTP/HTTPS request (health probe) to the specified path in each of your configured backends. This request can be either a GET or HEAD (HEAD is preferred due to less overhead) request. We can change the frequency Front Door do the health probe (for the demo purpose, I have set it to 5 seconds)

Then it considers the response status and the latency.  A 200 OK status code indicates the backend is Healthy. Everything else is considered a failure. If it doesn't get any response it's counted as a failure. So for my active backends, Front Door looks at the last n health probe responses. If at least x are healthy, the backend is considered healthy. Here n is the Sample size and x is Successful samples required property in load-balancing settings.

Read More:

   Azure Front Door: Health probes

Hope this helps.

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya