Monitoring Azure Event Hubs

Effective monitoring is crucial for understanding the health, performance, and usage of your Azure Event Hubs. This guide covers the key metrics, tools, and best practices for monitoring your Event Hubs instances.

Key Metrics to Monitor

Azure Event Hubs provides a rich set of metrics that can be accessed through Azure Monitor. Here are some of the most important ones:

  • Incoming Requests: Total number of incoming requests to Event Hubs.
  • Outgoing Requests: Total number of outgoing requests from Event Hubs.
  • Incoming Messages: Total number of messages sent to Event Hubs.
  • Outgoing Messages: Total number of messages received from Event Hubs.
  • Captured Messages: Number of messages captured by Event Hubs Capture.
  • Throughput (Bytes In/Out): The amount of data being processed.
  • Connection Count: The number of active connections to the namespace.
  • Throttled Requests: Number of requests that were throttled due to exceeding limits.
  • Latency: The time it takes for a request to be processed.

Using Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is the primary tool for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your Azure resources. You can access Event Hubs metrics and logs directly from the Azure portal.

Accessing Metrics in Azure Portal

  1. Navigate to your Event Hubs namespace in the Azure portal.
  2. In the left-hand menu, under "Monitoring," select "Metrics."
  3. You can then select the desired metric, aggregation type (e.g., Sum, Average, Count), and time range.
  4. Pin charts to your Azure Dashboard for a consolidated view.

Setting Up Alerts

Proactive alerts can notify you of potential issues before they impact your users. You can set up alerts based on specific metric thresholds.

Tip: Consider setting alerts for metrics like "Throttled Requests," high "Latency," or low "Incoming Messages" (if you expect a certain volume).

Log Analytics and Diagnostics Settings

For deeper analysis and troubleshooting, you can send Event Hubs diagnostic logs to Log Analytics. This allows you to query your logs using Kusto Query Language (KQL).

  • Diagnostic Settings: Configure diagnostic settings for your Event Hubs namespace to send logs (e.g., operational logs, metrics) to Log Analytics, Storage Accounts, or Event Hubs itself.
  • Log Categories: Key log categories include AzureMetrics, AzureDiagnostics, and operation-specific logs.

Example Log Analytics Query

To find all throttled requests in the last hour:

AzureDiagnostics
    | where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.EVENTHUB" and Category == "AzureDiagnostics"
    | where TimeGenerated > ago(1h)
    | where OperationName == "ThrottledRequests"
    | count

Azure Advisor Recommendations

Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations for optimizing your Azure resources. It can offer insights into performance, security, cost, and reliability for Event Hubs.

  • Regularly check Azure Advisor for recommendations related to your Event Hubs usage and configuration.

Best Practices for Monitoring

  • Define Baselines: Understand your normal operational metrics to quickly identify anomalies.
  • Set Meaningful Alerts: Avoid alert fatigue by focusing on critical thresholds.
  • Regularly Review Dashboards: Use Azure Dashboards to visualize key metrics and health status.
  • Integrate with Application Monitoring: Correlate Event Hubs metrics with application-level telemetry for end-to-end visibility.
  • Monitor Consumer Lag: If using consumer groups, monitor the lag of your consumers to ensure data is being processed in a timely manner.

By implementing a robust monitoring strategy, you can ensure the reliability and performance of your Azure Event Hubs, enabling you to build resilient and scalable event-driven applications.