Azure Alert Rules and Notifications

Version: 0.1

June 2025

Introduction

During deployment, you can decide if you want to activate monitoring of the application logs. Activating it will enable ShArc to track major events and notify you about them.

These events might be:

• Corrupt files
• Potential attacks
• Job failures
• Job completions

Note: Using this feature will add approximately $3 per month to the infrastructure cost.

21.8.2025 Notice:

Azure email alert format change for job notifications

For customers with email notifications enabled, Azure has changed the format of the information alert emails. The job results are now embedded in the Context section as JSON, which makes it hard to read.

Example: { "name": "ResultDescription", "value": " Job finished: Type: 'OffloadJob', 1 of 1 files succeeded, Total size: 46.497 MB, including 0 B from deleted versions, Duration: 7 seconds, (JobId: 61914b0c-0a41-4f9d-a022-53401f5ca5d0)" }

What you can do

• Keep the alert:
You’ll still get an email when a job completes. For clear, full details, you can open the progress page at the ShArc web application.

• Disable the alert:
If you prefer not to receive these emails, you can turn off the rule:

1. In the Azure portal, open your ShArc resource group.
2. Select ShArc-Information-Alert-Rule.
3. On the Overview tab, choose Disable.

What’s next

We plan to replace the current system with another system to customize the emails and make them in a human-readable format. Instead of JSON in the Context section.

Infrastructure

We leverage Azure Alert Rules and Azure Action Groups for this functionality.

By default, we will add a basic configuration that sets up alert rules for important severity levels:

• Critical errors
• Major errors
• Major warnings
• Major event information

Each alert rule is assigned to a general action group named ShArc-Alerts with standard email notifications configured.

Log scanning occurs hourly and outputs aggregated results, except for informational alerts, in which case every event is sent non-aggregated and scanned constantly to provide real-time details.

Recommendation

• Create a rule in your mail client to move these notifications to a specific folder.
• Example: All emails from azure-noreply@microsoft.com with subject containing "ShArc" → move to “ShArc Alerts” folder.

Disable Alerts

You can disable specific or all alert rules:

1. Navigate to the ShArc resource group
2. Select the desired alert rule
3. Click on Disable on the overview page

Removing Email Notifications from Alerts

1. Navigate to the ShArc resource group
2. Select the desired alert rule
3. Click on Edit on the overview page
4. Go to Actions
5. Remove the ShArc-Alerts action group
6. Go to Review + save
7. Click Save