This post was originally published here

(This post was originally published on Mexia’s blog on 1st September 2017)

Microsoft recently released the public preview of Azure Event Grid – a hyper-scalable serverless platform for routing events with intelligent filtering. No more polling for events – Event Grid is a reactive programming platform for pushing events out to interested subscribers. This is an extremely significant innovation, for as veteran MVP Steef-Jan Wiggers points out in his blog post, it completes the existing serverless messaging capability in Azure:

  • Azure Functions – Serverless compute
  • Logic Apps – Serverless connectivity and workflows
  • Service Bus – Serverless messaging
  • Event Grid – Serverless Events

And as Tord Glad Nordahl says in his post From chaos to control in Azure, “With dynamic scale and consistent performance Azure Event grid lets you focus on your app logic rather than the infrastructure around it.”

The preview version not only comes with several supported publishers and subscribers out of the box, but also supports customer publishers and (via WebHooks) custom subscribers:

EventGridPubsSubs

In this blog post, I’ll describe the experience in building a sample logging mechanism for a service hosted in Azure Service Fabric. The solution not only logs all events to table storage, but also sends alert emails for any error events:

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Creating the Event Grid Topic

This was an extremely simple process executed in the Azure Portal. Create a new item by searching for “Event Grid Topic”, and then supply the requested basic information:

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Once created, the key items you will need once the topic is created is the Topic Endpoint and the associated key:

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Creating the Event Publisher

As mentioned previously, there are a number of existing Azure services that can publish events to Event Grid including Event Hubs, resource groups, subscriptions, etc. – and there will be more coming as the service moves toward general availability.  However, in this case we create a custom publisher which is a service hosted in Azure Service Fabric. For this sample, I used an existing Voting App demo which I’ve written about in a previous blog post, modifying it slightly by adding code to publish logging events to Event Grid.

The first requirement was storing the topic endpoint and key in the parameter files, and of course creating the associated configuration items in the ServiceManifest.xml and ApplicationManifest.xml files (this article provides information about application configuration in Service Fabric):

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Note that in a production situation the TopicKey should be encrypted within this file – but for the purposes of this example we will keep it simple.

Next step was creating a small class library in the solution to house the following items:

  • The Event class which represents the Event Grid events schema
  • A LogEvent class which represents the “Data” element in the Event schema
  • A utility class which includes the static SendLogEvent method
  • A LogEventType enum to define logging severity levels  (ERROR|WARNING|INFO|VERBOSE)

To see an example of how to create the Event class, refer to fellow Azure MVP Eldert Grootenboer’s excellent post.  The only changes I made were to assign the properties for my custom LogEvent, and to add a static method for sending a collection of Event objects to Event Grid (notice how the Event.Subject field is a concatenation of the Application Name and the LogEventType – this will be important later on):

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The utility method that creates the collection and invokes this static method is pretty straight forward:

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This all makes it simple to embed logging calls into the application code:

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Creating the Event Subscribers

Capturing All Events

The first topic subscription will be an Azure Function that will write all events to Azure table storage. Provided you’ve created your Function App in a region that supports the Event Grid preview (I’ve just created everything aside from the Service Fabric solution within the same resource group and location), you will see that there is already an Event Grid Trigger available to choose. Here is my configured trigger:

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As you can see, I’ve also configured a Table Storage output. The code within this function creates a record in the table using the Event.Subject as a partition and the Event.Id as the row key:

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Using the free Azure Storage Explorer tool, we can see the output of our testing:

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Alerting on ERROR Events

Now that we’ve completed one of the two subscriptions for our solution, we can create the other subscription which will use a filter on ERROR events and raise an alert via sending an email notification.

The first step is to create the Logic App (in the same region as the Event Grid) and add the Event Grid Trigger. There are a few things to watch out for here:

  • When you are prompted to sign in, the account that your subscription belongs to may or may not work. If it doesn’t, try creating a Service Principal with contributor rights for the Event Grid topic (here is an excellent article on how to create a service principal)
  • The Resource Type should be Microsoft.EventGrid.topics
  • The Suffix field contains “ERROR” which will serve as the filter for our events
  • If the Resource Name drop-down list does not display your Event Grid topic at first, type something in, save it and then click the “x”; the list should hopefully appear. It is important to select from the list as just typing the display name will not create the necessary resource ID in the topic field and the subscription will not be created.

You can then follow this with an Office365 Email action (or any other type of notification action you prefer). There are four dynamic properties that are available from the Event Grid Trigger action (Subject, ID, Event Type and Event Time):

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After saving the Logic App, check for any errors in the Overview blade, and then check the Overview blade for the Event Grid Topic – you should see the new subscription created there:

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Finally, we can test the application. My Voting demo service generates an exception (and a ERROR logging event) when a vote is cast for a null/empty candidate (see the ERROR entry in the table screenshot above). This event now triggers an email notification:

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Summary

So this example may not be the niftiest logging application on the market (especially considering all of the excellent logging tools that are available today), but it does demonstrate how easy it is to get up and running with Event Grid. You’ve seen an example of using a custom publisher and two built-in subscribers, including one with intelligent filtering. To see how to write a custom subscriber, have a look at Eldert’s post “Custom Subscribers in Event Grid” where he uses an API App  subscriber to write shipping orders to table storage.

Event Grid is enormously scalable and its consumption pricing model is extremely competitive. I doubt there is anything else quite like this on offer today. Moreover, there will be additional connectors coming in the near future, including Azure AD, Service Bus, Azure Data Factory, API Management, Cosmos DB, and more.

For a broader overview of Event Grid’s features and the capabilities it brings to Azure, have a read of Tom Kerkhove’s post “Exploring Event Grid”. And to understand the differences between Event Hub, Service Bus and Event Grid, Saravana Kumar’s recent post sums it up quite nicely. Finally, if you want to get your hands dirty and have a play, Microsoft has provided a quickstart page to get you up and running.

Happy Eventing!