Update! Azure Service Bus Presence On The Classic Azure Portal

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To Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Relay customers,

We have some updates regarding our presence on the classic Azure Portal. As mentioned in a previous blog post about retiring Service Bus on the classic Azure Portal this blog post is about what to expect if you decide to start using the new Azure Portal today or sometime before the October 5, 2017 retirement date (we are extending our support from the earlier stated date of September 15, 2017).

When we first announced we would be offboarding from the classic Azure Portal we acknowledged three major elements we were missing that customers were expecting for us to have on the new portal:

  1. Metrics for Service Bus Basic, Standard, and Premium Messaging plans as well as metrics for Azure Relay
  2. Support for slashes "/" in entity names
  3. Viewing Event Hubs in a Messaging type namespace in the portal

The good news is that two of these items will be available in the new portal around the October 5 deprecation date! Please read on to find out which two items will be supported going forward and the one that won't be.

Metrics

What metrics, in preview, are coming to the new portal for Service Bus Basic, Standard, and Premium Messaging plans?

  • Incoming messages
  • Length (Delayed)
  • Outgoing Messages
  • Failed Requests
    • Internal Server Errors
    • Server Busy Errors
    • Other Errors
  • Size (Delayed)
  • Successful Requests
  • Total Requests

What about Azure Relay? These metrics will be offered at an entity level.

  • Active Connection
  • Active Listener Connections
  • Bytes Transferred
  • Listener Connection Attempts
    • Success
    • Client Error
    • Server Error
  • Sender Connection Attempts
    • Success
    • Client Error
    • Server Error
  • Listener Connection Disconnects
  • Sender Connection Disconnects

Slashes "/" in entity names (Supported Today)

For some quick background on the second item, "Support for slashes '/' in entity names", if you create a Queue or Event Hub under a namespace that has "/" in the name, it will not be available for you to manage in the new Azure Portal. We know it sounds strange and we have a blog post that hopefully helps explain the concept better.

To provide an answer for this in the meantime, since the new Azure Portal  has a strong reliance on Azure Resource Manager, it has an implicit assumption that the names of Azure Resource Manager addressable resources should not contain multiple URI segments in the resource name.

ARM is required to parse the Resource ID URI for Routing, authorization, auditing, policy, etc. and all those functions require URI segments to be in pairs, where the first segment in the pair is the resource type and the second segment is the resource name.

For example, in the below ARM ID for a topic, ARM expects the segments in bold to denote the resource "type" and the segments in italics to be the resource name:

/subscriptions/ {sub-id} /resourcegroups/ {resourceGroupName} /provider/Microsoft.ServiceBus/namespaces/myServiceBusNamespace/topics/myTopicName

This assumption is obviously broken in the case of multi-segment topic names that Service Bus and Relays natively support, this means that these specific entities cannot be created or managed with Azure Resource Manager. Don't worry though, we have support for this today on the new Azure Portal, find out how we do this here.

Viewing Event Hubs in a Messaging type namespace in the portal (Not Supported)

For the third item, as part of our namespace separation plan we began working on last year, we separated Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs and Azure Relay from one another to be their own stand-alone resources. There are still some remnants of the old way though.  For instance, a Messaging namespace with an Event Hub entity and a Queue entity!

If you view this particular namespace in the new Azure Portal today you would see your Queue entity, but not your Event Hub entity. We will NOT be supporting the ability to manage an Event Hubs entity on a Messaging namespace type in the new portal.  We recommend you split your namespace, however, if this is not an option you can use NamespaceManager or Service Bus Explorer to manage these Event Hubs. Please keep in mind you cannot create any NEW Event Hub entities under that Messaging namespace, we have disabled that option. New Event Hub entities can only be created on an Event Hubs namespace. If you wish to convert your Messaging Namespace with Event Hubs entities please read this article about our auto-convert option.

We hope you have decided to move to the new Azure Portal already or are in the process of doing so before the October 5 date. We also hope you enjoy the new experience!

Happy Messaging and Data Streaming,

The Azure Service Bus, Event Hubs, and Relay team

--Relay out--