Azure Storage Queue - Retrieving hidden messages

Question

Is there a way to retrieve azure storage queue messages that are hidden? Background - I have been searching for an app/cmdlet/third party tool that would let me backup the entire queue including hidden messages (for troubleshooting purposes) but unable to find one.

I have also considered writing a powershell script to download all messages, but couldn't find a way to retrieve hidden ones.

Help will be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

While I don't know if such a tool exists for Azure Storage Queues, have you considered Azure Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions for your queueing system? Under a topic and subscription model, you can set up the following architecture:

[Topic] Place messages on this queue. They get replicated to each subscription.
 [Subscription1] Your backup process reads this queue and persists messages.
 [Subscription2] Your application reads from this queue for normal operation.

This has a few benefits:

• it decouples your backup and production systems, making it less likely that, for example, a faulty backup script ends up impacting production behavior
• Locked ("hidden") messages apply only to the given subscription, so your backup queue will never have to deal with a message that is hidden or locked by the production queue.

Similar setups can certainly be achieved using storage queues, but Azure Service Bus has this sort of behavior built in.