NServiceBus logging and monitoring in Azure

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We are planning to host our NServiceBus application in Azure web and worker roles (using Azure Service Bus as transport). Existing documentation is a bit unclear when it comes to monitoring and logging of Azure based endpoints.

  • What would be recommended practices to set up logging and monitoring of such setup?
  • Would you recommend creating a custom logging module inheriting from ILog interface?
  • Does ServiceControl work well for monitoring endpoints in Azure? If yes, where do we deploy it?

EDIT: Igorek's answer helped me to solve logging issue. Can anyone comment on ServiceControl part of the question?

2
azurenservicebus

2 Answers

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NServiceBus can hook into and utilize log4net. log4net can send its data to Windows Event Logs thru standard log4net appender. Azure Diagnostics can move the data from Event Logs to WADLogs table for inspection by on-demand tools such as Cerebrata's Diagnostic Manager or 24x7 monitoring services such as AzureWatch. http://www.paraleap.com Alternatively, log4net can also send the logs directly to a custom Azure Table if you want to build your own monitoring tools.

Also, consider monitoring queue/topic depths of your Service Bus, to make sure that stuff is moving thru correctly. Also, consider possibly scaling by the number of messages in SB queues or topics if your NSB setup supports dynamically adding/removing instances.

Disclaimer: I work for company that makes AzureWatch and we happen to have a number of customers who utilize AzureWatch to monitor their NSB-enabled apps.

0
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ServiceControl can indeed be used to monitor your Azure endpoints, just set up ServiceControl for the transport you use, drop the ServiceControl plugins into your endpoint bin folder, and you're good to go.

ServiceControl is best deployed locally, or on an azure virtual machine.