Quickstart: configure email notifications for security alerts

Security alerts need to reach the right people in your organization. By default, Microsoft Defender for Cloud emails subscription owners whenever a high-severity alert is triggered for their subscription. This page explains how to customize these notifications.

Use Defender for Cloud's Email notifications settings page to define preferences for notification emails including:

  • who should be notified - Emails can be sent to select individuals or to anyone with a specified Azure role for a subscription.
  • what they should be notified about - Modify the severity levels for which Defender for Cloud should send out notifications.

To avoid alert fatigue, Defender for Cloud limits the volume of outgoing emails. For each email address, Defender for Cloud sends:

  • approximately four emails per day for high-severity alerts
  • approximately two emails per day for medium-severity alerts
  • approximately one email per day for low-severity alerts

Configuring the details of the contact who is to receive emails about security alerts.

Availability

Aspect Details
Release state: General availability (GA)
Pricing: Email notifications are free; for security alerts, enable the enhanced security plans (plan pricing)
Required roles and permissions: Security Admin
Subscription Owner
Contributor
Clouds: Commercial clouds
National (Azure Government, Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet)

Customize the security alerts email notifications via the portal

You can send email notifications to individuals or to all users with specific Azure roles.

  1. From Defender for Cloud's Environment settings area, select the relevant subscription, and open Email notifications.

  2. Define the recipients for your notifications with one or both of these options:

    • From the dropdown list, select from the available roles.
    • Enter specific email addresses separated by commas. There's no limit to the number of email addresses that you can enter.
  3. To apply the security contact information to your subscription, select Save.

Customize the alerts email notifications through the API

You can also manage your email notifications through the supplied REST API. For full details, see the SecurityContacts API documentation.

This is an example request body for the PUT request when creating a security contact configuration:

URI: https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/<SubscriptionId>/providers/Microsoft.Security/securityContacts/default?api-version=2020-01-01-preview

{
    "properties": {
        "emails": "admin@contoso.com;admin2@contoso.com",
        "notificationsByRole": {
            "state": "On",
            "roles": ["AccountAdmin", "Owner"]
        },
        "alertNotifications": {
            "state": "On",
            "minimalSeverity": "Medium"
        },
        "phone": ""
    }
}

Next steps

To learn more about security alerts, see the following pages: