1
votes

I have been researching on Microsoft Azure Event Hubs. My goal is to figure out a way to provide automatic scalability. This is a experimental work and I am really only trying to know what can I do with Azure event hubs. I do not have access to the Azure platform to test test anything :( .

Well, so far, I found that through REST API and Service Bus Powershell I can add Throughput Units (to increase performance - I am relying on this: Scale Azure Service Bus through Powershell or API) and increase or decrease Event's Expiration time (which might influence capacity - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn790675.aspx).

The problem is that, presuming that the previous techniques work and I am able to scale event hubs' performance automatically, I still need a way to know when to trigger scalability mechanisms. To know when and how to trigger scalability, I need to work on some functions that rely upon the event hub's metrics (or a way to monitoring it). The problem is that I can't really find any metrics. The only thing that I find is this: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-how-to-monitor/ - Which actually does not solve my problem because although it may present some interesting metrics, it does not serve the purposes of my "application" (which will come if I can prove that I can successfully scale Azure automatically); and this Azure service bus statistics/Monitoring - which's links are not working.

Surely I can find more information about Service Bus Explorer, and surely it may provide some interesting insights over the event hub metrics, I am just wondering if there is something like this: https://github.com/HBOCodeLabs/incubator-storm/blob/master/STORM-UI-REST-API.md that allow me to access some kind of metrics, rather than creating my own metrics

Thanks in advance Best regards

3

3 Answers

2
votes

You can retrieve metrics about Event Hubs (an Event Hub is a Service Bus Entity) using the Service Bus Entity Metrics REST APIs(https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn163589.aspx). Using this you can retrieve the same metrics displayed in the portal such as:

  • Number of incoming messages
  • Incoming throughput
  • Outgoing throughput

These should help you determine when you need to scale your application up or down.

This video is useful for getting started https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Subscribe/Service-Bus-Namespace-Management-and-Analytics

2
votes

If 3rd party services are an option, look into CloudMonix @ http://cloudmonix.com It can monitor Event Hubs (among gazillion other Azure-related things) and execute Azure Automation runbooks (among gazillion other actions) as a reaction to load conditions/throughout of a whole hub or individual partitions and optionally based on any other metrics in your environment.

Your Azure Automation runbooks could have the logic to execute increases in your EH's throughout, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with the product. HTH

0
votes

Service Bus Explorer is great. I actually use this. ServiceBus Explorer