Being designing and architecting solutions for our clients on Azure Cloud for many years, we know that Service Bus plays an integral part in most of the application architectures when a messaging layer is involved. At the same time we also know that there is no straight answers when customer ask us about native monitoring and alerting capabilities of the service bus. For visual dashboards, you would need to drill down to the overview section of the queue blade.

For Diagnostic, there are only operational logs available natively.

Although there are few 3^rd party products available in the market who have built a good story around monitoring and alerting on azure service bus but they come at an additional cost.

In quest of answering our customer question on how we can get monitoring and alerting capabilities of azure service bus, I figured out that answer lies within azure itself. This blog post illustrate a proof-of-concept solution which was done as part of one of our customer engagement. The PoC solution uses native azure services including:

Service Bus
Functions
Application Insights
Application Insight Analytics
Application Insight Alerts
Dashboard

The only service that would add cost to your monthly azure bill would be functions (assuming application insight is already part of your application architecture). You would need to analyze the cost of purchasing a 3^rd part monitoring product vs. function cost.

Let’s deep dive in the actual solution quickly.

Step 1: Create an Azure Service Bus Queue

This is of course a perquisite since we will be monitoring and alerting around this queue. For PoC, I created a queue (by name queue2) under a service bus namespace with root managed key. Also I filled up the queue using one of my favorite tool “Service Bus Explorer”.

Step 2: Create an Azure Function

Next step is to create a function. This function logic is to:

Query the service bus to fetch all the queues and topics available under it.
Get the count of active and dead letter messages
Create custom telemetry metric
And finally log the metric to Application Insight

I choose to use the language “C#” but there are other language available. Also I configured the function to trigger every 5 seconds so it’s almost real time.

Step 3: Add Application Insight to Function

Application Insight will be use to log the telemetry of service bus by the function. Create or reuse an application insight instance and use the instrumentation key in the C# code. I have pasted the function code used in my PoC. The logging part of the code relies on custom metrics concept of application insights. For PoC, I created 2 custom metric – “Active Message Count” and “Dead Letter Count”.

Sample Function:

#r "Microsoft.ServiceBus"
using System;
using Microsoft.ServiceBus;
using Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Net.Http;
using static System.Environment;
using Microsoft.ApplicationInsights;
using Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.DataContracts;

public static async Task Run(TimerInfo myTimer, TraceWriter log)
{
var namespaceManager = NamespaceManager.CreateFromConnectionString(
Env("ServiceBusConnectionString"));

foreach(var topic in await namespaceManager.GetTopicsAsync())
{
foreach(var subscription in await namespaceManager.GetSubscriptionsAsync(topic.Path))
{
await LogMessageCountsAsync(
$"{Escape(topic.Path)}.{Escape(subscription.Name)}",
subscription.MessageCountDetails, log);
}
}
foreach(var queue in await namespaceManager.GetQueuesAsync())
{
await LogMessageCountsAsync(Escape(queue.Path),
queue.MessageCountDetails, log);
}
}

private static async Task LogMessageCountsAsync(string entityName,
MessageCountDetails details, TraceWriter log)
{
var telemetryClient = new TelemetryClient();
telemetryClient.InstrumentationKey = "YOUR INSTRUMENTATION KEY";
var telemetry = new TraceTelemetry(entityName);
telemetry.Properties.Add("Active Message Count", details.ActiveMessageCount.ToString());
telemetry.Properties.Add("Dead Letter Count", details.DeadLetterMessageCount.ToString());
telemetryClient.TrackMetric(new MetricTelemetry("Active Message Count", details.ActiveMessageCount));
telemetryClient.TrackMetric(new MetricTelemetry("Dead Letter Count", details.DeadLetterMessageCount));
telemetryClient.TrackTrace(telemetry);
}
private static string Escape(string input) => Regex.Replace(input, @"[^A-Za-z0-9]+", "_");
private static string Env(string name) => GetEnvironmentVariable(name, EnvironmentVariableTarget.Process);

Step 4: Test your function

Next step is to test your function by running it. If everything is setup right, you should start seeing the telemetry in the application insight. When you select one the trace, you should be able to view the “Active Message Count” and “Dead Letter Count” under custom data. In the screenshot below, my queue2 has 17 active messages and 0 dead letter.

Step 5: Add an Application Insight Analytics Query

Next step is to use AI Analytics to render service bus chart for monitoring. From the AI blade, you need to click on the Analytics icon. AI Analytics is a separate portal with a query window. You would need to write a query which can render a time chart for a queue based on those custom metrics. You can use the below sample query as a start.

Sample Query:

traces
| where message has 'queue2'
| extend activemessagecount = todouble( customDimensions.["Active Message Count"])
| summarize avg(timestamp) by activemessagecount
| order by avg_timestamp asc
| render timechart

Step 5: Publish the Chart to Dashboard

The AI Analytics chart can be publish (via pin icon) to Azure Dashboard which will enable monitoring users to actively monitor the service bus metrics when they login to azure portal. This will remove the need to drill down to the service bus blade.

Refer this to know more about the creating and publishing charts to dashboards.

Step 6: Add Alerts on the custom counter

The Last step is to create application insight alerts. For PoC, I created 2 alerts on “Active Message Count” and “Dead Letter Message Count” with a threshold. These will alert monitoring users with an email, if the message count exceeds a threshold limit. You can also send these alert to external monitoring tools via web hook.

Attached is sample email from azure AI alert:

Hope these steps will at least gives you an idea that above custom solution with azure native services can serve basic monitoring and alerting capabilities for service bus and for that matter other azure services as well. The key is to define your custom metrics that you would like to monitor against and then setup the solution.