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Management and operation of the Azure production network

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This article describes how Microsoft manages and operates the Azure production network to secure the Azure datacenters.

Monitor, log, and report

The management and operation of the Azure production network is a coordinated effort between the operations teams of Azure and Azure SQL Database. The teams use several system and application performance-monitoring tools in the environment. And they use appropriate tools to monitor network devices, servers, services, and application processes.

To ensure the secure execution of services running in the Azure environment, the operations teams implement multiple levels of monitoring, logging, and reporting, including the following actions:

  • Primarily, the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) gathers monitoring and diagnostic log information from many places, including the fabric controller (FC) and the root operating system (OS), and writes it to log files. The agent eventually pushes a digested subset of the information into a pre-configured Azure storage account. In addition, the freestanding monitoring and diagnostic service reads various monitoring and diagnostic log data and summarizes the information. The monitoring and diagnostic service writes the information to an integrated log. Azure uses the custom-built Azure security monitoring, which is an extension to the Azure monitoring system. It has components that observe, analyze, and report on security-pertinent events from various points in the platform.

  • The Azure SQL Database Windows Fabric platform provides management, deployment, development, and operational oversight services for Azure SQL Database. The platform offers distributed, multi-step deployment services, health monitoring, automatic repairs, and service version compliance. It provides the following services:

    • Service modeling capabilities with high-fidelity development environment (datacenter clusters are expensive and scarce).
    • One-click deployment and upgrade workflows for service bootstrap and maintenance.
    • Health reporting with automated repair workflows to enable self-healing.
    • Real time monitoring, alerting, and debugging facilities across the nodes of a distributed system.
    • Centralized collection of operational data and metrics for distributed root cause analysis and service insight.
    • Operational tooling for deployment, change management, and monitoring.
    • The Azure SQL Database Windows Fabric platform and watchdog scripts run continuously and monitor in real time.

If any anomalies occur, the incident response process followed by the Azure incident triage team is activated. The appropriate Azure support personnel are notified to respond to the incident. Issue tracking and resolution are documented and managed in a centralized ticketing system. System uptime metrics are available under the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and upon request.

Corporate network and multi-factor access to production

The corporate network user base includes Azure support personnel. The corporate network supports internal corporate functions and includes access to internal applications that are used for Azure customer support. The corporate network is both logically and physically separated from the Azure production network. Azure personnel access the corporate network by using Azure workstations and laptops. All users must have a Microsoft Entra account, including a username and password, to access corporate network resources. Corporate network access uses Microsoft Entra accounts, which are issued to all Microsoft personnel, contractors, and vendors and managed by Microsoft Information Technology. Unique user identifiers distinguish personnel based on their employment status at Microsoft.

Access to internal Azure applications is controlled through authentication with Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS). AD FS is a service hosted by Microsoft Information Technology that provides authentication of corporate network users through applying a secure token and user claims. AD FS enables internal Azure applications to authenticate users against the Microsoft corporate active directory domain. To access the production network from the corporate network environment, users must authenticate by using multi-factor authentication.

Next steps

To learn more about what Microsoft does to secure the Azure infrastructure, see: