Lab 6: Block releases when there are active alerts

lab6-release-gates

Note: The Azure DevOps Pipelines release gates for Azure Monitor alerts appear to (currently) only support Classic Alerts.

# Guidance/Steps:
Pre-requisites (Lab 5) – app insights enable, server delay introduced

## Setup the alert
- From App Insights (prod), go to Configure / Alerts, then click “View classic alerts” from the top nav bar
- Click “Add metric alert (classic)”
- Enter name “slow-server”
- Select the prod App Insights instance
- Select metric “Server response time”, condition: Greater than, Threshold value: 10, Period: Over the last 5 mins
- Enter your email address for notificaitons
- Click OK
- Ensure the alert is in Active status
- Visit Azure Monitor (from left resource nav) and click Alerts then “View classic alerts”
- Reload the web app home page a few times until you see the “slow-server” alert appear in the list of alerts (classic alerts) and you’ll get a notification too
- Click the alert to see more info

## Add gate to prevent deployment on active alerts
- Edit your release pipeline
- Click Pre-Deployment Conditions icon for the Prod stage
- Enable “Gates”
- Set delay before evaluation for gates to 0 mins
- Add “Query Azure Monitor alerts” – Resource type ”Application Insights”, Resource name (choose the prod app insights instance), Alert rules: select “slow-server”
- Set the evaluation options for your alert gate to 5 mins
- Save changes
- Create a new release manually using the last build
- Verify the prod stage fails on the query azure monitor alerts gate and the deploy is blocked
- In Azure Monitor, disable the alert
- After the release gate re-evaluation period (< 5 mins), the deployment should be allowed to proceed (if not set alert threshold to much higher, e.g. 10 sec)