Azure Service Bus is a fully managed enterprise message broker that enables asynchronous messaging between distributed applications. It is designed to decouple application components, allowing them to communicate reliably, securely, and at scale.

With Datadog’s Azure Service Bus integration, you can:

• Surface metrics
• Troubleshoot performance issues
• Stay ahead of customer incidents

Surface Service Bus metrics with the Azure integration

Once you’ve set up the Microsoft Azure integration, Azure Service Bus metrics will start flowing into Datadog. Users can access metrics at the topic level, as well as granular metrics for each of the subscriptions in each service bus topic, including active_messages and dead_lettered_messages.

This provides insight into subscriptions within a topic. For example, say your team uses Azure Service Bus topics and subscriptions to distribute customer order events to multiple microservices (e.g., billing, shipping, and fraud detection). Each service subscribes to the topic to process relevant messages. You notice that some messages are not being processed on time, leading to delays in shipping notifications and invoice generation. In Datadog, you find that the shipping service’s subscription has a spiking active_message count, while the billing and fraud detection services are processing normally. You scale up the shipping service to process messages faster, resolving the issue.

Users can also track the free space and size of their topics or queues, helping them obtain a more complete picture of their in-use message brokers. Monitors can be configured to send alerts when queues or topics begin to run out of space, allowing teams to take corrective action before downstream systems are impacted by message throttling.

The Azure Service Bus integration includes an OOTB dashboard that surfaces metrics like active_messages, dead_letter_messages, and more, and allows for more granular tracking of messages in each Service Bus topic as well as queue and topic storage.

Troubleshooting performance issues

The visibility into message queues, topics, and subscriptions provided by Datadog’s Azure Service Bus integration helps teams troubleshoot delays, failures, and bottlenecks more efficiently. Key metrics like active_messages, dead_lettered_messages, and throttled_requests help detect processing issues and optimize message flow. Additionally, correlating these metrics with logs and traces within Datadog allows engineers to pinpoint failures, investigate root causes, and take proactive actions before they impact application performance.

For example, say you have an e-commerce application that relies on Azure Service Bus queues to process customer orders asynchronously, but users report that orders are taking too long to process. You need to identify the root cause. The Azure Service Dashboard shows a spike in active_messages and a drop in completed_messages, indicating that messages are piling up and not being processed efficiently. Using Datadog Log Explorer, you search for logs from Azure Functions or VMs consuming the queue: service:azure-service-bus status:error OR warning.

The logs reveal timeouts in message processing, pointing to a slow downstream database query delaying message handling. To resolve the issue, you identify and fix slow database queries in logs, scale out consumers (e.g., increase Azure Functions instances), and adjust retry policies and visibility timeout for better fault handling. To prevent future delays, you can set up Datadog anomaly detection on active_messages when they exceed a certain threshold (e.g., 500).

Stay ahead of customer issues

Datadog’s Azure Service Bus integration helps teams proactively monitor message queues and topics, ensuring smooth communication between services and preventing delays that could impact customers. By tracking queue backlogs, message failures, and throttling events in real time, teams can identify potential issues early, scale resources as needed, and resolve bottlenecks before they affect customer experience.

For example, say your company provides a multi-tenant SaaS platform, where each customer has a dedicated Azure Service Bus namespace to handle messaging between services. Datadog’s integration helps you monitor and alert when a customer is approaching quota limits or experiencing message throttling. You notice that one customer’s queue size (active messages in the queue) and their throttled_requests metrics are starting to spike.

Using Datadog Log Explorer, you search for throttling events and identify the impacted queues: service:azure-service-bus status:throttled OR quota_exceeded. The logs show that the customer is sending messages faster than their consumers can process them, leading to queue backlog growth. To resolve the issues, you contact the customer with insights about their usage trends and recommendations. You suggest upgrading their Azure Service Bus SKU to handle higher throughput. You then scale up their consumers (e.g., increase Azure Functions or VMs processing their queue). Additionally, you enable message Time-To-Live (TTL) policies to automatically expire stale messages and free up space.

Monitor Azure Service Bus with Datadog

In this post, we’ve highlighted how the Datadog Azure Service Bus integration provides deep visibility into your queues and topics by surfacing granular metrics for each of the subscriptions in each service bus topic. We’ve also discussed how you can use the Datadog Azure Service Bus integration to troubleshoot issues in your message queues, and stay ahead of customer issues.

Datadog offers more than 1,000 integrations with popular infrastructure technologies, including 60 integrations with all key Azure services, providing deep visibility into cloud infrastructure, applications, security, and networking within the Azure ecosystem. These integrations allow teams to collect real-time metrics, logs, and traces from services like Azure Virtual Machines, Kubernetes Service (AKS), Functions, and App Service, enabling end-to-end observability. With native support for Azure Monitor and logs, Datadog helps teams detect performance bottlenecks, optimize costs, and proactively troubleshoot issues across distributed cloud environments. The ability to monitor Azure Key Vault events in Datadog helps teams ensure compliance and proactively protect themselves against security threats. Finally, Datadog’s Azure Service Bus integration enables customers to monitor the status and performance of Service Bus queues and topics, including scheduled messages, completed messages, and open connections.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our documentation, or, if you’re new to Datadog, sign up for a free trial to get started.