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Microsoft Azure Application Gateway Unhealthy Backend Host Pool Sentinel

Monitors Azure Application Gateway backend health pools for unhealthy host instances to prevent traffic blackholing.

Categories
CloudInfrastructure

How it works

This workflow executes az network application-gateway show-backend-health via an Azure CLI container to audit the operational health of all backend pools and servers behind a Microsoft Azure Application Gateway (v1/v2). In layer-7 application load balancing, when backend virtual machines, VM scale sets, or App Service endpoints fail health probe HTTP checks, the gateway ceases routing or returns HTTP 502 Bad Gateway responses. The flow inspects all backend pool targets, flattens the result, and alerts network operations when unhealthy backend targets are detected.

What you get

  • Real-time visibility into degraded application gateway backend targets.
  • Prevents customer-facing HTTP 502/504 gateway timeouts.
  • Immediate detection of backend server probe failures and health regression.

Who it's for

  • Cloud Network Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers managing Azure ingress controllers and load balancers.
  • Application Operations teams maintaining high-availability web services.

Why orchestrate this with Kestra

  • Continuous Ingress Health Auditing: Periodically polls gateway health alongside backend application statuses.
  • Zero Footprint Azure CLI Execution: Standardizes Azure management tasks within containerized steps.
  • Fast Remediation Dispatch: Routes detailed failure notifications directly to network reliability channels.

Prerequisites

  • Azure Service Principal with Network Contributor or Reader permissions on the Application Gateway resource.
  • Secrets AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET, AZURE_TENANT_ID, and SLACK_WEBHOOK configured in Kestra.

Quick start

  1. Import the blueprint.
  2. Provide your Azure Subscription ID, Resource Group, and Application Gateway name.
  3. Run the workflow to inspect backend health.

How to extend

  • Automatically trigger diagnostic log exports to Azure Log Analytics for failing probe investigations.
  • Add a remediation step to recycle unhealthy VM scale set instances.

Links

See How

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