How do I know in advance that there is patching activity is being planned from Microsoft and how do I configure my vms under maintenance so it won't affect our services?

How do I know in advance that there is patching activity is being planned from Microsoft and how do I configure my vms under maintenance so it won't affect our services? Does Service Health helps in this situation or is there any alert mechanism which I configure so that I can know there is some planned activity under that region..? Kindly suggest