Continuous health monitoring is one of the features of Azure Site Recovery. You don’t have to subscribe to this feature exclusively. In the previous chapter, we saw how Azure Site Recovery can be configured for different scenarios. Once all the configurations are done, the Hyper-V recovery manager monitors the health of the protected resource instances continuously. It is done by Hyper-V recovery manager remotely from Azure. This procedure consists of collecting the metadata of virtual machines which is used for recovery.

What is happening in Azure Site Recovery is, the metadata is continuously collected for recovery purpose. Every time when data is transferred as a function of continuous health monitoring, it is always encrypted, thus it is safe and secure.

The data is replicated at the secondary site. The secondary site is made available in case of failover. In order to ensure that everything is working fine, test failover can be carried out. Planned and unplanned failovers are two circumstances in which the secondary site is to be made available. The planned failover is usually done for testing, maintenance, etc. while unplanned failover happens when a disaster occurs. No matter what kind of failover, the virtual machines on the primary site are continuously monitored and the metadata is collected. Thus, continuous health monitoring is a feature that keeps the data at the secondary site always available.

In addition to the back-up and orchestrated recovery, Azure Site Recovery continuously monitors the health of all its resource instances.