We’ve released some improvements to our Azure status integration. StatusGator can now read your Azure Resource Health events via a service principal. Previously the only supported authentication mechanism was OAuth. Both pull the same data and produce the same alerts – the difference is who the connection belongs to, and what happens to it over time.
| Sign in via OAuth | Service principal |
|---|---|
| You click Connect, sign in, and StatusGator monitors every subscription your account can see. Connection belongs to user who signed in via OAuth. | You register an app in Microsoft Entra ID, grant it the Reader role, and paste its credentials. The connection belongs to your organization, not to a person. |
Why choose service principal?
It’s not tied to an individual. An OAuth connection is tied to whoever signed in. When that person leaves, has their account disabled, or simply has their Azure role narrowed, the connection stops working and you could miss Azure outage alerts. A service principal has no person behind and therefore doesn’t suffer from this problem.
Nothing of ours gets installed in your tenant. OAuth requires your directory to consent to the StatusGator application for Azure Service Management access. In plenty of organizations that’s a review process which can take a while. The service principal path is easier – you create the service principal, assign it access to subscriptions or management groups you want to monitor.
You control the scope precisely. OAuth inherits whatever the signed-in user can see, which could be everything if they are an administrator. With a service principal, the scope is a Reader role assignment you make deliberately. You can choose a single subscription, several, or a whole management group.
Its activity is attributable. Reads show up in the Azure Activity Log as a distinct service principal rather than as a named employee doing hundreds of reads a day, and it’s a single identity you can review or revoke on its own.
Why choose OAuth?
The installation process. OAuth is a simple setup process. It’s a 2-3 click setup, with no other scripts or configuration. Tokens auto refresh automatically.
Token refreshes: For a service principal, you need to refresh tokens manually depending on your organization setup. Every 6, 12, or 24 months is typical unless your organization allows open-ended token expiration.
Summary
Either authentication mechanism allows the same thing: Outages posted by Azure that affect your infrastructure will get included in your StatusGator dashboard. In both cases, we only have access to read health data from subscriptions that your service principal or user is attached to. The improved visibility of our private status monitor integrations like this one, is an important reason leading enterprise IT teams choose StatusGator.
