Read this tutorial to understand how to monitor Azure Service Bus proactively to constantly track your services’ performance:
Most of today’s enterprises rely on the cloud for developing their business applications.
As the Azure footprint evolves, monitoring the resources becomes inevitable. It is mandatory to ensure the health and performance of the applications, reduce unexpected downtimes, get alerted on issues proactively before they get noticed by your customers.
Eventually, monitoring turns out to be the crucial factor to instantly spot and fix complex performance issues, allowing you to focus on other important areas of innovation in business.
Table of Contents:
Monitoring Azure Service Bus
Significance of Azure Service Bus Monitoring
Organizations generally tend to develop robust monitoring systems when they have a business-critical application built using Azure services especially, when the Azure Service Bus is heavily relied on sending millions of messages across the platform, fulfilling a range of use cases like implementing the pub/sub pattern for event-driven architectures.
In these cases, a lot of things could go wrong!
For instance:
- Dead-letter messages: When a service can’t process a message, it gets in a special queue until someone investigates.
- Too many active messages: Indication of something has gone wrong or the service completely went down.
Can native tools be used to monitor Azure Service Bus at scale?
Azure Monitor offers monitoring features for a bunch of Azure resources as well as the Service Bus. It gathers all the metrics and logs from the service associated and then uses the data to analyze, visualize or respond to issues depending on the needs.
It provides all the necessities to get started with monitoring, including dashboards, app insights, log analytics, alerts, action group, and rules where you can define how and when to trigger an alert, etc. But for production environments, any enterprise would require more than just this basic set of monitoring features offered by the Azure Monitor.
Major Challenges With Azure Monitor
Here are the biggest challenges faced while using Azure monitors for the Service Bus:
- Lack of consolidated monitoring: This allows you to monitor only individual resources and not your entire business application.
- No message visibility: Doesn’t allow to view or edit active or dead-lettered Service Bus messages at the production scale.
- Insufficient message processing capability: Azure Monitor does not support any message processing, though basic actions like sending/receiving/reprocessing Service Bus messages can be achieved using the Service Bus Explorer for test environments.
- No message reprocessing: If a message fails to be transferred and ends up in the dead-lettered queue, it is not possible to resubmit again with the modified content using Azure Monitors.
- Lack of end-to-end tracing: It would be hard to visualize how the message flows within your system.
- No Intelligent Automation: It is not possible to bulk reprocess or auto-correct the state of your Service Bus in case of downtime.
- Limited monitoring for Topic Subscriptions: Azure Monitor supports setting up alerts on Service Bus Topics but not on individual Subscriptions.
- Limited Governance and Auditing: No features to keep track of who does what for your Azure applications
In this scenario, enterprises are forced to develop custom monitoring solutions, but the problem is, that process is even more time-consuming and will require a lot of manpower to maintain the enterprise-grade tools.
How Turbo360 Helps Overcome Native Monitoring Challenges
Turbo360 is a third-party tool with the ability to group distributed Azure resources into logical containers aiming to provide application-level management and monitoring. It covers all the areas required to maintain the health of your Azure applications, be it monitoring, distributed tracing automation, and auditing.
Also, the tool specifically has features to overcome all the drawbacks of Azure Monitors with its out of the box support for Azure Service Bus Monitoring
Modern features for Azure Service Bus Monitoring
Monitor multiple Service Bus Queues and Topics
- Turbo360 enables proactive monitoring of Service Bus on various metrics and properties like the count of active messages, dead-lettered messages, scheduled messages, etc.
- Set threshold rules to get notified whenever there is a violation. For instance, set the error threshold value for the dead-lettered message count to be 20, and it would instantly alert you when that count is reached.
- Monitor the health status of your Service Bus and reduce resource downtime by auto-correcting its state
Additionally, a consolidated alert report will be generated to give insights into all the resources associated with your business applications.
The tool can be integrated with a variety of notification channels including Teams, Slack, Service Now, etc., to send you alerts in time of critical issues and it can even be of great support in performing the root-cause analysis.
Service Bus Topic Subscription Monitoring
Turbo360 comes as an exception, providing features to monitor individual Topic Subscriptions on different metrics, properties, and status, whereas all other APM tools are limited to monitoring only the Topics.
Get Complete Message Visibility
Use the advanced search option to retrieve any active or dead-lettered messages, then easily view the content and properties of those messages with just a few more clicks.
Message processing features:
- Process a huge number of Service Bus messages without any manual intervention.
- View the reasons for dead lettering of messages and get to reprocess it effortlessly.
- Repair and resubmit active or dead-lettered messages to any Service Bus Queue or Topic of your choice.
- Save time by auto-reprocessing dead-lettered messages in bulk.
Customizable Dashboards
Track and visualize real-time data of your Service Bus Queues, Topics, and Subscriptions in the form of charts for quicker understanding. Turbo360 also offers a unique business application dashboard to enable better visibility of every resource constituting your LoB application.
End-to-end Message Tracing
Achieve full visibility on how a Service Bus message flows through your Azure application and track those messages in all stages of your business transaction along with necessary properties like location, message-id, customer-id, etc.
Restricted User Access
This allows defining granular access restrictions, allowing specific users to carry out operations on your Service Bus. This way, you can ensure that only the authorized users have performed all the actions.
You can also track the activities done by those users with Turbo360’s Governance and Audit feature.
Suggested Reading =>> Comprehensive review of Turbo360
Conclusion
I hope you understood the key reasons for having an effective solution to achieve Azure Service Bus monitoring, which ensures that you constantly have an eye on your services’ performance.
The blog also sheds light on the features of Azure Monitors and its limitations while monitoring multiple Service Bus Queues and Topics, along with an alternate (Turbo360 – 15 Day Free Trial) to resolve all those challenges!