Azure Service Bus Relay Occasional FaultException

Question

We can't determine why the Azure BasicHttpRelay is throwing an occasional FaultException without any details. We've enabled WCF diagnostic tracing, but the available stack trace information is still the same. It seems like the WCF client channel fails for a brief time and then shortly returns.

We do cache the WCF Channel (e.g. CreateChannel), but this is the first time we've experienced this strange behavior. We have other Azure Service Bus relay solutions that work fine with this approach.

Error Message:

There was an error encountered while processing the request.

Stack Trace:

   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.HandleReply(ProxyOperationRuntime operation, ProxyRpc& rpc)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.Call(String action, Boolean oneway, ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Object[] ins, Object[] outs, TimeSpan timeout)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.InvokeService(IMethodCallMessage methodCall, ProxyOperationRuntime operation)
   at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.Invoke(IMessage message)

Exception rethrown at [0]: 
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at [our WCF method]...

FaultException - FaultCode Details:

Name: ServerErrorFault
Namespace: http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/relay
IsPredefinedFault: false
IsReceiverFault: false
IsSenderFault: false

Soap Message

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <s:Header />
  <s:Body>
    <s:Fault>
      <faultcode xmlns:a="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/relay">a:ServerErrorFault</faultcode>
      <faultstring xml:lang="en-US">There was an error encountered while processing the request.</faultstring>
      <detail>
        <ServerErrorFault xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/relay" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" />
      </detail>
    </s:Fault>
  </s:Body>
</s:Envelope>

Through debugging, we can see the server properly responds to the message requests (via IDispatchMessageInspector), but the client fails to handle the response appropriately (IClientMessageInspector reports fault). Subsequent relay requests will succeed after the client channel seemingly corrects itself. These failures seem to be intermittent and not load-driven. We never see these FaultException errors using basicHttpBinding outside the Azure relay.

Does anyone have any suggestions? We are using Azure SDK 1.8.

I've tried configured a new Service Bus Relay namespace using owner shared secret, but still seeing the same results.

Answer 1

After reaching out to MS - this issue turned out to be an MS bug with the Relay or the SDK, specifically when using Http Connectivity Mode. At this point, the only workaround is ensure you have the appropriate outgoing TCP ports opened up to ensure reliable connectivity with the Azure Relay.

Allow Outgoing TCP Ports: 9350 - 9354

MS has told us that they are still working on resolving the root cause. Hopefully this workaround will help others. Our corporate firewall had these TCP ports blocked which forced all communication over port 80 which must trigger this issue. The positive thing is that opening up these ports enables faster connectivity to the relay when starting up your listeners (AutoDetect doesn't have to check the TCP ports availability every time).