How to alert on queue size on azure service bus

Question

I have a premium service bus in Azure with a number of Queues. I can set max size for these, but I can't seem to find a way to alert the support team, via any route, but I would prefer email, if these queues exceed 1,000 messages in length, ie our consumers have fallen over or are not processing fast enough.

How can I set up some form of alerting for queue length on Azure service bus?

P.S. we still seem to be waiting for it to be implemented as a first class feature: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/231545-diagnostics-and-monitoring/suggestions/4486464-alerts-based-on-queue-size

Answer 1

Traditionally, a solution was indeed to pull message counts using NamespaceManager and report that value periodically. While it's an approach that works, there's another alternative that is emerging these days - Azure Monitor Service.

With this approach, unlike polling for data, Azure Service Bus is reporting to Monitor the metrics. Those metrics can be queried or alerts be created sending notifications to email addresses, webhook, or LogicApp. It's still fresh and in preview, but is shaping up nicely. For Azure Service Bus specifically, you can already get the metrics for a namespace and entity specific information should be available in a foreseeable future.

Update

I've raised an issue for Azure Service Bus you can track to see when it's available.