Azure Service Bus Management

Microsoft Azure Service Bus is a reliable information delivery service. The purpose of this service is to make communication easier. When two or more parties want to exchange information, they need a communication facilitator. Within a Service Bus namespace, you can use one or more instances of two different communication mechanisms, each of which connects applications in a different way. The choices are:

• Queues, which allow one-directional communication. Each queue acts as an intermediary (sometimes called a broker) that stores sent messages until they are received. Each message is received by a single recipient.
• Topics, which provide one-directional communication using subscriptions-a single topic can have multiple subscriptions. Like a queue, a topic acts as a broker, but each subscription can optionally use a filter to receive only messages that match specific criteria.

Challenges in managing Azure Service Bus

Service Bus is a communication mechanism in the cloud that's accessible from pretty much anywhere. The operations and management of a solution are always an after thought for decades. The architects and developers focus mainly on delivering the solution to the business and pay very little attention to how that solution can be managed and operated on a daily basis.
Your support team spends a lot of time on day-to-day operations to regulate activities like:

1. Make sure Azure Service Bus resources are up and running and notify someone during downtime.
2. Resubmit messages that get stuck in your Service Bus dead letter queue based on business requirements
3. Change certain properties of the service like increasing the time-to-live values of the queues.
4. May be change the subscription rules on the Service Bus Topics
5. Trace a message that's been lost in the translation somewhere in the solution

Serverless360 Capabilities

Activities Configuration

Sending messages to a Queue or Topic is similar to sending events to an Event Hub. Serverless360 has the capability to send events/messages immediately from the list of Queues/Topics by creating an Activity Configuration. Activity Configuration has been introduced considering the re-usability.

What is an Activity?

Activities allow you to push sample messages into desired Queues or Topics. It can be used mainly for testing purposes. Ex: Sending 5000 sample messages into a Queue with think time, batches, multiple threads etc. You can have multiple activities configured and executed them either instantaneously or via a schedule.

Serverless360 has the option to send messages from the listed Queues/Topics by simply entering the desired values and hit the Send button. As every task is processed in the cloud – it will queue the task to a certain queue from where it will be picked up and processed. However, the processing is fast enough and you will be able to see the in-progress activity in “In Progress” tab. Sometimes you may not find an activity in “In Progress” tab if the number of events is too small. As the process is quick – the process might be completed momentarily. Read Automated Activities for more details

Monitoring Service Bus Resources

When an Service Bus resource is associated with a Composite Application, you can enable either an threshold alarm to trigger alerts to the configured notification channel(s) by comparing the current value against the expected value or set a health alarm to check the health status. You can read extensive documentation on Monitoring here.