High number of Azure service bus incoming and successful requests - azure

I'm testing placing scheduled messages onto my Azure service bus queues. No more then 10 or so in total but it seems like the statistics in my dashboard show otherwise!
It looks like it's showing thousands of incoming requests!
Question - am I not reading the chart correctly when it says 93.63k as 93,000+ ?

Incoming messages is the metric you need to select for determining the number of incoming messages, check the metrics list here.
As the graph by default displays the metrics of the Namespace and not the metrics of a particular Queue or Topic, the values may look high. Use dimension filter to display the metrics specific to a particular Queue or Topic.

Related

How does Azure Dead-Lettered Message count work in Service Bus Standard Metrics?

I configured azure metric alert when there is a dead-lettered message in a specific topic.
The dead-lettered queue only has one message but I discovered that when using Average, it is not always remain as absolute number (1) sometime it shows as 0.8 or 1.2
And when I used Maximum, it shows as 2 messages in the dead-lettered queue (sometime fluctuate to 1).
Any idea how does Azure actually calculate the dead-lettered queue metrics?
Thanks
It is expected behavior for average as it is calculated for a time period.
Calculating by segment might provide accurate results.

Is there any message receiving limit per device on Azure IoTHub?

Is there any message receiving limit per device on Azure IoTHub?
If any, can I remove or raise the upper limit without registering additional devices?
I tested 2 things to make sure if I can place enough load (ideally, 18000 message/s)on Azure IoT Hub in the future load tests.
① Send a certain amount of mqtt messages from a VM.
② Send a certain amount of mqtt messages from two VMs.
I expected that the traffic of ② would be twice as large as that of ①. But it wasn't. Maximum messages per minute on IoTHub of ② is not so different from that of ①. Both of them are around 3.6k [message/min]. At that time, I registered only one device on IoT Hub. So I added another device and tested ② again to see if the second device could increase the traffic. As a result, it increased the traffic and IoT Hub had bigger messages per minute.
Judging from this result, I thought IoTHub has some kind of limit on receiving message per device. But I am not sure. So if anyone know about the limit, could you tell me what kind of limit it is and how to raise the upper limit without registering additional devices because in production we use only one device.
For your information, I know there is a "unit" to increase the throughput in IoTHub. To increase the load I changed the number of unit from 2 to 20 in both ① and ②. However, it did not make messages/min in IotHub bigger. I'd also like to know why the "unit" did not work as expected.
Thank you for reading, in advance. Any comment would be my help.
Every basic (B1,B2, B3) or standard unit of IoT Hub SKU (S1, S2, S3) has specific daily message quota as per https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/iot-hub/. A single IoTHub can support 1 million devices and there is no per device cost associated, only the msg/day quota as above.
e.g. S1 SKU has 400,000 msg/day quota and you can add multiple units of S1 to increase capacity. S2 has 6000,000 msg/day and S3 has 300,000,000 msg/day quota per unit and more units can be added.
Before this limit is reached IoTHub will raise alert which can be used to automatically add more units or jump to higher SKU.
Regarding your test, there are specific throttling limits to avoid misuse of the service here -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-devguide-quotas-throttling
As an example, for 18000 msg/sec you will need 3 units of S3 SKU (each with 6000 msg/sec rate limit). In addition there are other limits like how quickly connections can be attempted, if using Azure IoT SDK's the built-in retry logic helps overcome this otherwise you need to have retry policy. Basically you dont want million device trying to connect at the same time, IoTHub will only accept connections at a certain rate. This is not concurrent connection limit but a rate at which new connnections are accepted.

Azure Event Grid Function Trigger - Probation

We have a Azure setup with a Azure Event Grid Topic and to that we have a Azure Function Service with about 15 functions that are subscribing to the topic via different prefix filters. The Azure Function Service is set up as a consumption based resource and should be able to scale as it prefers.
Each subscription is set up to try deliveries for 10 times during maximum 4 hours befor dropping the event. So far so good and the setup is working as expected – most of the time.
In certain, for us unknown situations, it seems like the Event Grid Topic cannot deliver events to the different functions. What we can see is that our dead letter storage fill up with events that have not been delivered.
Now to my question
From the logs we can see the reason for various events not being delivered. The reason is most often Outcome: Probation. We can not find any information from Microsoft on what this actually means.
In addition, the Grid fails and adds the event to the dead letter log before both the timeout policy (4 hours) and the delivery attempts policy (10 retries) has exceeded. Some times the Function Service is idling and do not receive any events from the Grid.
Do any of you good people have ideas of how we can proceed with the troubleshooting for this? What has happened between the Grid and Funciton App when the error message Probation occurs? One thing that we have noticed is that the number of connections from the Grid to our function app is quite high in comparison to the number of events delivered.
There are not other incoming connections to the Function App besides the Event Grid.
Example of a dead letter message
[{
"id":"a40a1f02-5ec8-46c3-a349-aea6aaff646f",
"eventTime":"2020-06-02T17:45:09.9710145Z",
"eventType":"mitbalAdded",
"dataVersion":"1",
"metadataVersion":"1",
"topic":"/subscriptions/XXXXXXX/resourceGroups/XXXX_STAGING/providers/Microsoft.EventGrid/topics/XXXXXstaging",
"subject":"odl/type/mitbal/v1",
"deadLetterReason":"TimeToLiveExceeded",
"deliveryAttempts":6,
"lastDeliveryOutcome":"Probation",
"publishTime":"2020-06-02T17:45:10.1869491Z",
"lastDeliveryAttemptTime":"2020-06-02T19:30:10.5756332Z",
"data":"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><Stock><Action>ADD</Action><Id>123456</Id><Store>123</Store><Shelf>1</Shelf></Stock>"
}]
Function Service Metrics
Blue = Connections (count)
Red = Function Executions (count)
White = Requests (count)
I'm not sure if you have figured the issue here, but here are some insights for others in a comparable situation.
Firstly, probation is the outcome when the destination is not healthy, for which Event Grid would still attempt deliveries.
Based on the graph, it looks like functions hit the 100 executions mark and then took a while to scale out for the next 100. You could get better results by tweaking the host.json settings depending on what each function execution does.
Including scale controller logs could shed more light into what is happening internally when scaling out.
Also, another option would be to send events into service bus or event hubs first and then have a function run from there.

Calculate incoming bytes per second in Azure Event hub

How do I calculate the incoming bytes per second for an event hub namespace?
I do not control the data producer and so cannot predict the incoming bytes upfront.
I am interested in adjusting the maximum throughput units I need, without using the auto-inflate feature.
1 TU provides 1 MB/s ingress & 2 MB/s egress, but the metrics are reported per minute, not per second.
Can I make a decision based on the sum/avg/max incoming bytes reported in the Azure portal?
I believe you'll need to use Stream Analytics to query your stream and based on the query output change your TU on Event Hub.
You can also try to use Azure Monitor, but I believe it won't group per second as you need, so you'd better try the first option.
Per second metrics cannot be reliable due to very nature of potential intermittent spikes at the traffic in and out. 1 minute averages are good to monitor and you can easily take action via a Logic App.
Check messaging metrics to monitor here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-metrics-azure-monitor#message-metrics

Can a date and time be specified when sending data to Azure event hub?

Here's the scenario. I'm not working with real-time data. Instead, I get data from my electric company for the past day's electric usage. Specifically, each day I can get # of kwhs for each hour on the clock on the past day.
So, I'd like to load this past information into event hub each following day. Is this doable? Does event hub support loading past information, or is it only and forever about realtime streaming data, with no ability to load past data in?
I'm afraid this is the case, as I've not seen any date specification in what limited api documentation I could find for it. I'd like to confirm, though...
Thanks,
John
An Azure Event Hub is really meant for short-term storage. By default you may only retain data up to 7 days. After which the data will be deleted based upon an append timestamp that was created when the message first entered the Event Hub. Therefore it is not practical to use an Azure Event Hub for data that's older than 7 days.
An Azure Event Hub is meant for message/event management, not long term storage. A possible solution would be to write the Event Hub data to an Azure SQL server or blob storage for long term storage. Then use Azure Stream Analytics (an event processor) to join the active stream with the legacy data that has accumulated on the SQL server. Also note, you can call this appended attribute. It's called "EventEnqueuedUtcTime". Keep in mind that it will be on the server time, whose clock may be different from the date/time of actual measurement.
As for appending a date time. If you are sending it in as a JSON, just simply append it as a key and message value. Example Message with Time: { "Time": "My UTC Time here" }
A streaming system of this type doesn't care about times a particular application may wish to apply to the items. There simply isn't any processing that happens based on a time field unless your code does it.
Each message sent is an EventData which contains a message with an arbitrary set of bytes. You can easily include a date/time in that serialized data structure, but EventHubs won't care about it. There is no sorting performed or fixed ordering other than insertion order within a partition which is defined by the sequence number. While the enqueued time is available it's mostly useful for monitoring how far behind in processing you are.
As to the rest of your problem, I'd agree with the comment that EventHubs may not really be the best choice. You can certainly load data into it once per day, but if it's really only 24 data points/day, it's not really the appropriate technology choice unless it's a prototype/tech demo for a system that's eventually supposed to have a whole load of smart meters reporting to it with fair frequency. (Note also that EventHubs cost $11/month minimum, Service Bus Queue $10/Month min, and AWS SQS $0 min)

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