We often perform planned availability group failovers in SQL Server for maintenance, patching, upgrades, and even hardware rotation. Typically, our failovers are fast, but sometimes they take longer – and it’s not always intuitive why, as there are no obvious ties to time of day, database size, or transaction volume.
Shaving even a handful of seconds from the process can improve the application and end user experience; it can also drastically reduce alert noise or, at least, how long alerts have to stay muted. There’s a lot of material out there about performing AG failovers correctly (no data loss), but