What alerts would you create for a .NET API hosted in Azure, and how would you avoid noisy alerts?

What Azure Monitor alerts would you create for a production .NET API?

Covers symptom-based alerting for latency, error rate, availability, dependency failures, queue length, and resource pressure.

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TL;DR

I would alert on sustained symptoms that reflect user impact: availability failures, high error rate, high latency, unhealthy instances, critical dependency failures, and queue age for background work. I would avoid paging on every isolated exception because that creates noise and teaches the team to ignore alerts. Each alert needs a clear owner and a first action.

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Alert design, user impact, Azure Monitor, Application Insights metrics, dependency health, queue metrics, and runbook thinking.

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Why this question matters
Alerting is easy to overdo and hard to make useful. This drill matters because the production behavior is shaped by platform configuration, code boundaries, and the operational path the team will use during a real incident.
I would alert on sustained symptoms that reflect user impact: availability failures, high error rate, high latency, unhealthy instances, critical dependency failures, and queue age for background work. I would avoid paging on every isolated exception because that creates noise and teaches the team to ignore alerts. Each alert needs a clear owner and a first action.
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Stronger answer
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I would tune alerts around service behavior, not just raw resource metrics. CPU and memory matter, but a user-impacting alert often comes from request failures, slow dependencies, failed health checks, or queue backlog. I would include links to dashboards, recent deployments, logs, and a runbook in the alert payload. After an alert fires, I would review whether it was actionable and adjust thresholds, windows, or severity.

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Details

Paging on every exception regardless of rate or impact.
No runbook or owner for alerts.
Ignoring queue age and background job failure metrics.
Using CPU alerts alone as a proxy for user experience.

What alerts would you create for a .NET API hosted in Azure, and how would you avoid noisy alerts?

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