Identify if a message is already read in Azure Service Bus Topic - azure

I have 65k records in Azure Service Bus Topic, while testing, whenever my test application is started, it reads all the 65k records. Can you please help me how can we avoid reading messages that have already read or How can we read only the messages that are send after executing test application?

From the question, it's unclear what exactly you're after. Here are a few things for consideration.
Queues/subscriptions are intended to be read by the consumers, not to store messages and access conditionally. To avoid consuming messages, you should consume those either by using ReceiveAndDelete receiving more, or PeekLock and completing the received messages.
If these messages are test messages and are not intended for the production, do not mix the environments and use different namespaces.
Alternatively, set a short TimeToLive on your test messages to get rid of those. You could also drop the entity and recreate it, but I try to avoid this if your performing testing quite often.

Related

Architecture issue - Azure servicebus and message order guarantee

Ok so i'm relatively new to the servicebus. Working on a project where we use Azure servicebus for queueing messages. Our architecture roughly looks like the following:
So the idea is that in our SourceSystem all kinds of stuff happens, which leads to messages being put on the servicebustopics. Now our responsibility is syncing these events to the external client so they are aware of what we are doing.
Now the issue is that currently we dont use servicebus sessions so message order isnt guaranteed. Also consider the following scenario:
OrderCreated
OrderUpdate 1
OrderUpdate 2
OrderClosed
What happens now is if the externalclients API is down for say OrderUpdate 1 and OrderUpdate 2, we could potentially send the messages in order: OrderCreated, OrderClosed, OrderUpdate 1, OrderUpdate 2.
Currently we just retry a message a few times and then it moves into the deadletter queue for manual reprocessing.
What steps should we take to better guarantee message order? I feel like in the scope of an order, message order needs to be guaranteed.
Should we force the sourcesystem to put all messages for a order in a servicebus session? But how can we handle this with multiple topics? And what do we do if message 1 from a session ends up in the deadletter?
There are a lot of considerations here, should we use a single topic so its easier to manage the sessions? But this opens up other problems with different message structures being in a single topic?
Id love to hear your opinions on this
Have a look at Durable Functions in Azure. You can use the 'Async Http API' or one of the other patterns to achieve the orchestration you need to do.
NServicebus' Sagas might also be a good option, here is an article that does a very good comparison between NServicebus and Durable Functions.
If the external client has to receive all those events and order matters, sending those messages to multiple topics where a topic is per message type will make your mission extremely hard to accomplish. For ordered messaging first you need to use a single entity (queue or topic) with Sessions enabled. That way you can guarantee ordered message processing. In case you have multiple external clients, you'd need to have a session-enabled entity (topic) per external client.
Another option is to implement a pattern known as Process Manager. The process manager would be responsible to make the decisions about the incoming messages and conclude when the work for a given order is completed or not.
There are also libraries (MassTransit, NServiceBus, etc) that can help you. NServiceBus implements Process Manager via a feature called Saga (tutorial) and MassTransit has it as well (documentation).

How do I remove events from Eventhub

I might be confused how EventHubs supposed to be used or need guidance on how to reliably process events posted into Eventhub. I export Azure ActivityLog to Eventhub and currently just using console application to read those messages. What I don't understand is what I'm supposed to do with events which I already read and processed. Say I want to write content of all messages into Storage account AppendLog. For this I need to delete messages which I already processed (like it would be done if it will be message queue), how do I do that with eventhub?
You cannot delete them. From the docs:
Event Hubs retains data for a configured retention time that applies across all partitions in the event hub. Events expire on a time basis; you cannot explicitly delete them.
Back to your question:
Say I want to write content of all messages into Storage account AppendLog. For this I need to delete messages which I already processed
I am not sure why you need this though. You can keep a pointer to the last read message so you are able to process only new messages. Why should you need to delete the older ones? You can read about offsets and ceckpointing here.
What technique are you using for reading the messages?
If you need a pattern of popping messages, you need the Queue or Topic from the Azure Service Bus.
When you ack that message, it is popped from the queue.

How does Azure Service Bus Queue guarantees at most once delivery?

According to this doc service bus supports two modes Receive-and-Delete and Peek-Lock.
If using Peek-Lock Mode if the consumer crashes/hangs/do a very long GC right after processing the message, but before the messageId is "Completed" and visibility time expires there's a chance that same message is delivered twice.
Then how does Microsoft says that Service Bus supports at most once delivery mode. Is it because of the Receive-and-Delete mode which sends messages only once.But then again, if something happens while consumers are processing the message then that valuable info is lost.
If yes then what is the best way to ensure exact once delivery using Azure Services Bus as Queue and Azure Functions as Consumers.
P.S. The one approach I can think of is storing MessageID's in blob but since in my case number of MessageID's could be very large storing and loading all of them is not right approach.
Azure Functions will always consume Service Bus messages in Peek-Lock mode. Exactly Once delivery is basically not possible in general case: there's always a chance that consuming application will crash at wrong time just before completing the message, and then the message will be re-delivered.
You should strive to implement Effectively Once processing. This is usually achieved with idempotent message processor.
Storing MessageID's (consumer-side de-duplication) is one option. You could have a policy to clean up old Message IDs to keep the size of such storage manageable. To make this 100% reliable you would have to store Message ID in the same transaction as other modifications done by processor.
Other options really depend on your processing scenario. Find a way to make it idempotent - so that processing the same message multiple times is functionally same as processing it just once.

Move all messages from deadletter queue back into main queue of subscription

My service consumes messages from an Azure Service Bus subscription. A dependency of my service was down for a while, which caused a lot of messages to end up in the deadletter queue (DLQ). Now that the service is back up, I want to reprocess all messages from the DLQ. How can I move/resubmit all messages from the DLQ back in to the main queue.
Restrictions:
It's thousands of messages, so manually handling them isn't feasible.
The topic has about ten subscriptions. I don't want to resubmit the messages to the topic, because then all subscriptions would receive the messages, leading to double-processing.
I don't want to run the service against the DLQ directly, because some messages are broken and cause permanent errors, i.e. they would end up in the DLQ again, which would lead to an infinite loop. Moreover, the broken messages are put back at the front of the queue, effectively starving healthy messages that come after the broken ones.
I realize this is a while after the original post but if anyone else stumbles on this problem, there is a fairly handy solution baked into the Service Bus Explorer (which I have found to be incredibly handy with ASB development).
After connecting to your Service Bus and finding the needed namespace, find the desired topic and subscription with the deadletters in it. From there Right Click and Receive Deadletter Queue Messages and hit OK.
From there, highlight which you would like to send back to the main queue and hit Resubmit Selected Messages in Batch Mode.
Thomas, you probably already found your answer since this is quite awhile ago. think of DLQ (or any existing queue that you have) as just another collection variable like in a PC app, but residing on the cloud. just like a PC-app or in-memory collection variable from your tool-kit, you have many ways of utilising it. off course there are limitations and differences between these 2 types of collection variables, but that's how you design your solution as though the DLQ is just another collection variable by knowing those limitations and differences.
For some queuing implementations, one of the solutions would be to have another instance of the same app pointing to the DLQ, but with a fairly long visibility timeout (e.g. 6 or 12 or even 24 hours depending on your SLA), since you don't want to repeat them too often. However, this is not applicable to Azure service bus, as it limits the visibility timeout to at most 5 minutes.
if the DLQ contains broken un-recoverable jobs, you should fix the app to delete them based on the error messages when the unknown exception occurred. once the fix is deployed, such broken un-recoverable jobs would have been removed by your app and never get sent to the DLQ in the first place. and those already in the DLQ will be removed by the fixed app.
The only option to replay DLQ messages is to receive them from DLQ, create new message with same content and send it again to the topic. They will end up at the end of subscription queue.
You can't send messages directly to the subscription. There is a trick to add a metadata property to the message, and then adjust all except one subscription to filter out such messages. It's up to you to decide if it's going to help in your scenario.
As for tooling, we always did that with custom code, because we always needed some extra work to be done, like logging each replayed message for further analysis.
The quick answer is that you cannot directly move messages back to the main queue of a subscription. This is by design with how Microsoft implemented their topics and subscriptions.
Option #1
There is the option to use Azure Service Bus topic filters https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/topic-filters and define/tag your messages in a manner that would only allow them to be received on the targeted subscription.
Option #2
The other option would be to change your current implementation. You would set up "delivery queues" (regular service bus queues) and configure each corresponding subscription to auto forward its messages to these delivery queues. Your message processing logic would then listen on these "delivery queues" vs the subscription. Any failures would then result in DLQ messages on these associated "delivery queues" which could then be handled outside of the topic/subscriptions.

Set visibilitytimeout to 7days means automatically delete for azure queue?

It seems that new azure SDK extends the visibilitytimeout to <= 7 days. I know by default, when I add a message to an azure queue, the live time is 7days. When I get message out, and set the visibilitytimeout to 7days. Does that mean I don't need to delete this message if I don't care about message reliable? the message will disappear later 7 days.
I want to take this way because DeleteMessage is very slow. If I don't delete message, doesn't it have any impact on performance of GetMessage?
Based on the documentation for Get Messages, I believe it is certainly possible to set the VisibilityTimeout period to 7 days so that messages are fetched only once. However I see some issues with this approach instead of just deleting the message once the process is done:
What happens when you get the message and start processing it and somehow the process fails? If you set the visibility timeout to be 7 days, then the message would never appear in the queue again and thus the process it was supposed to do never gets done.
Even though the message is hidden, it is still there in the queue thus you keep on incurring storage charges for that message. Even though the cost is trivial but why keep the message when you don't really need it.
A lot of systems rely on Approximate Messages Count property of a queue to check on the health of processes which are performed by messages in a queue. Please note that even though you make the message hidden, it is still there in the queue and thus will be included in total messages count in the queue. So if you're building a system which relies on this for health check, you will always find your system to be unhealthy because you're never deleting the messages.
I'm curious to know why you find deleting messages to be very slow. In my experience this is quite fast. How are you monitoring message deletion?
Rather than hacking around the problem I think you should drill into understanding why the deletes are slow. Have you enabled logs and looked at the e2elatency and serverlatency numbers across all your queue operations. Ideally you shouldn't be seeing a large difference between the two for all your queue operations. If you do see a large difference then it implies something is happening on the client that you should investigate further.
For more information on logging take a look at the following articles:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/tags/analytics+2d00+logging+_2600_amp_3b00_+metrics/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/hh343262.aspx
Information on client side logging can also be found in this post: e client side logging – which you can learn more about in this blog post. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2013/09/07/announcing-storage-client-library-2-1-rtm.aspx
Please let me know what you find.
Jason

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