Azure Event Hubs Documentation

Monitoring Azure Event Hubs

Effective monitoring is crucial for understanding the health, performance, and usage of your Azure Event Hubs. This tutorial will guide you through the key monitoring tools and metrics available, helping you detect issues, optimize performance, and ensure your event streaming solution is running smoothly.

Why Monitor Event Hubs?

• Health and Availability: Ensure your Event Hubs are accessible and operational.
• Performance Optimization: Identify bottlenecks and optimize throughput.
• Cost Management: Track usage to understand billing and control costs.
• Troubleshooting: Quickly diagnose and resolve issues.
• Security: Monitor for suspicious activity.

Azure Monitor: Your Primary Tool

Azure Monitor is the comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your Azure and on-premises environments. For Event Hubs, it provides:

Metrics

Azure Monitor collects metrics that provide insights into the performance and operational state of your Event Hubs. Key metrics include:

• Incoming Messages: The number of messages sent to an Event Hub.
• Outgoing Messages: The number of messages retrieved from an Event Hub.
• Incoming Bytes: The amount of data (in bytes) sent to an Event Hub.
• Outgoing Bytes: The amount of data (in bytes) retrieved from an Event Hub.
• Requests: The number of requests made to the Event Hubs API.
• Successful Requests: The number of successful API requests.
• Throttled Requests: The number of requests that were throttled due to exceeding capacity limits.
• User Errors: The number of requests that resulted in a client-side error (e.g., 4xx errors).
• Server Errors: The number of requests that resulted in a server-side error (e.g., 5xx errors).

You can view these metrics in the Azure portal by navigating to your Event Hubs namespace, then selecting Metrics under the Monitoring section.

Activity Log

The Activity Log provides insights into subscription-level events that occurred in your Azure subscription. It records operations on Event Hubs resources, such as creating, updating, or deleting namespaces and entities. This is useful for auditing and understanding configuration changes.

Log Analytics and Diagnostic Settings

For more in-depth analysis, you can configure diagnostic settings to send Event Hubs logs and metrics to Log Analytics workspaces, Azure Storage, or a partner solution. Log Analytics allows you to query your data using Kusto Query Language (KQL), enabling advanced troubleshooting and trend analysis.

To configure diagnostic settings:

1. Navigate to your Event Hubs namespace in the Azure portal.
2. Under Monitoring, select Diagnostic settings.
3. Click Add diagnostic setting.
4. Select the logs and metrics you want to collect.
5. Choose a destination (e.g., Log Analytics workspace).
6. Click Save.

Key Monitoring Scenarios and How to Address Them

Scenario 1: High Throttled Requests

Observation: You notice a significant increase in Throttled Requests metrics.

Action:

• Scale Up: Increase the Throughput Units (TUs) or Processing Units (PUs) for your Event Hubs namespace.
• Optimize Producers/Consumers: Review your application logic to ensure efficient sending and receiving of messages.
• Partitioning: Ensure your Event Hubs are adequately partitioned to distribute the load.

Scenario 2: High Error Rates (User or Server Errors)

Observation: You see a spike in User Errors or Server Errors.

Action:

• Check Client Logs: Examine logs from your producer and consumer applications for specific error messages.
• Verify Authentication: Ensure connection strings and credentials are correct.
• Review Message Format: Validate that messages adhere to the expected schema.
• Contact Azure Support: For persistent server errors, reach out to Azure support.

Scenario 3: Low Message Throughput

Observation: Your Incoming Messages and Outgoing Messages metrics are lower than expected.

Action:

• Monitor Producer/Consumer Performance: Check the performance of your applications.
• Check for Network Issues: Investigate any network connectivity problems between your applications and Event Hubs.
• Review Consumer Lag: If using a consumer group, check if consumers are falling behind (requires custom metrics or logging).

Alerting with Azure Monitor

Proactive alerting is essential. You can set up alerts in Azure Monitor to notify you when specific metric thresholds are breached or when certain log events occur.

1. Navigate to your Event Hubs namespace.
2. Under Monitoring, select Alerts.
3. Click Create alert rule.
4. Define the conditions (e.g., Throttled Requests greater than 100 in the last 5 minutes).
5. Configure the action group (e.g., send an email, trigger a webhook).
6. Name and save your alert rule.

Visualizing Data with Dashboards

Create custom dashboards in the Azure portal to consolidate key Event Hubs metrics and logs in one place. This provides a quick, at-a-glance view of your system's health.

To add Event Hubs metrics to a dashboard:

1. Go to the Azure portal dashboard.
2. Click Edit dashboard.
3. Click Add tile.
4. Search for Metrics Chart and add it.
5. Configure the chart to display your desired Event Hubs metrics.
6. Save the dashboard.

Conclusion

By leveraging Azure Monitor's metrics, activity logs, and Log Analytics capabilities, you can gain deep visibility into your Azure Event Hubs. Setting up alerts and custom dashboards will help you maintain a robust, performant, and reliable event streaming platform.