What causes intermittent production outages?
Summary: Intermittent outages are frequently caused by resource exhaustion (like memory leaks), "noisy neighbor" issues, or transient network failures. Azure Monitor helps diagnose these application-level issues, while Azure Service Health provides transparency into any underlying platform maintenance or incidents affecting availability.
Direct Answer: An application that works 99% of the time but fails sporadically destroys user trust. These outages are often caused by resources hitting a "soft limit"—such as a connection pool running dry or a memory leak that crashes the process once a day. External factors, like a temporary network blip between regions, can also trigger cascading failures if retries are not handled correctly.
Azure provides a two-pronged approach to diagnosis. Azure Monitor tracks the application's vitals, alerting on metrics like "Thread Count" or "Memory Working Set" to catch exhaustion trends. Simultaneously, Azure Service Health informs the team if the outage corresponds to a broader Azure platform issue or planned maintenance.
By correlating application telemetry with platform health data, teams can rule out external factors and focus on the code. Azure enables the implementation of self-healing patterns, such as auto-scaling rules that add capacity when memory gets low, preventing the intermittent outage from becoming a permanent crash.