Monitoring Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions

Unlock real-time visibility and proactive control over your Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions with Nodinite. The Nodinite Message Queueing Monitoring Agent empowers integration experts to detect bottlenecks, automate alerts, and resolve issues instantly—ensuring seamless, reliable system integration and maximum uptime.

On this page, you will learn how to:

✅ Monitor Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions with no coding required
✅ Automatically discover and visualize all resources in your environment
✅ Detect bottlenecks, dead letters, and configuration issues before they impact business
✅ Take Remote Actions to resolve issues directly from Nodinite

The Nodinite Monitoring features for Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions ensure you get alerts for performance issues, message stockpiling, and provide remote actions to resolve dead letter messages and more.

This section explains what is monitored, how Nodinite translates data into actionable insights, and how you can use remote commands (Actions) to swiftly manage problems. See Remote Actions and the Managing Azure Service Bus Topic page for more details.

Nodinite auto-discovers deployed Azure Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions from your named Resource Groups. These are presented as Resources in Monitor Views.

Here's an example of Nodinite Monitoring of Azure Service Bus Topics.

Diagram: How Nodinite discovers and monitors Azure Service Bus Topics, Subscriptions, and related resources.

Monitoring Features

• No coding required(!)
• Automatic Discovery
  • Nodinite Azure agents use the SDK and the Azure Rest API and offer you an automatic discovery of your Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions. Sharing access to any individual Topic Subscription is very easy from within Nodinite.
• State Evaluation - Make sure the Azure Service Bus resources have the intended run-time state and not stockpiling messages

  If Nodinite can't check the state of your Azure Service Bus resources, chances are no one else can either.

• Auto-forwarding evaluation - OK, Warning, or Error when active messages remain on a Topic Subscription with Forward To set
• Age and count thresholds - Warning and Error when the oldest message is too old or there are too many messages; see Thresholds and Evaluation Settings
• Delivery Count - Warning and Error when messages are retried too often, before Azure dead-letters them
• Acknowledge Dead-Letters - Report already known dead-letter messages as Warning instead of Error

State evaluation

Each monitored 'Service Bus Topic Subscription' is displayed in Nodinite Monitor Views as Resources with its currently evaluated state. If you have 11 deployed Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions, then you will have 11 Resources in Nodinite with potentially different monitored evaluated states at any given moment.

Live overview with different states summarized in a pie chart

The evaluated state may be reconfigured using the Expected State override setting on every Resource within Nodinite.

Azure Service Bus Topic Subscription States

• All Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions belong to the 'Service Bus Topic Subscription' category:
  
  Here's an example of the category name for Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions.

• The Application name is based on physical deployment paths. This pattern guarantees uniqueness:

  • subscription name/resource group name/namespace name

Here's an example of Application naming pattern providing uniqueness

Note

Topic Hierarchy with Subscriptions
Azure Service Bus topics support hierarchical organization using forward slash (/) or tilde (~) characters (e.g., events/orders/created). When you create a topic with a forward slash (/), Azure Portal displays it as a tilde (~) character.

Topic Subscriptions themselves do not support hierarchical naming with special characters—they are already hierarchical by nature, as each subscription exists under a specific topic. For example:

• Topic: events/orders (subscriptions: crm-sync, analytics-processing, audit-logging)

This natural hierarchy (Topic → Subscriptions) provides logical organization without needing additional naming conventions for subscriptions. Nodinite automatically discovers and monitors this structure.

Each monitored Service Bus Topic Subscription is a Resource and can have one of the following states at any given moment. For a full list of Actions, see the Available Actions section below. The thresholds and settings behind the Warning and Error states are explained in Thresholds and Evaluation Settings.

Thresholds and Evaluation Settings

Open the Edit thresholds action on a Topic Subscription to override the global settings for that Topic Subscription. The Edit thresholds section on the Managing page covers the modal step by step; the shared Edit Thresholds page for Queues and Topic Subscriptions explains each panel in depth.

The top part of the Edit modal for a Topic Subscription: Resource details (including Forward to and Dead-letter messages acknowledged), Description, Delete Message on Resubmit, and the Allowed Timespan and Message Count panels under Topic Subscription Monitoring Thresholds.

The bottom part of the same modal: Delivery Count with Fixed evaluation and the Delivery Attempt Limit, Auto-forwarding set to Raise Warning, and Acknowledge Dead-Letters.

Allowed Timespan and Message Count

The standard Warning and Error thresholds. Allowed Timespan checks the age of the oldest message (format days.hours:minutes:seconds). Message Count checks the number of messages, using the selected Evaluation Type; the screenshot shows Comes First with both Warning/Error counts and Warning Limit (%)/Error Limit (%).

Delivery Count

Set Evaluation Type to Fixed and enter Warning and Error values to alert when "the oldest message's delivery count exceeds these values", before Azure dead-letters the message. The Delivery Attempt Limit box shows the limit configured on this Topic Subscription in Azure (for example, "After 10 retries, messages are Dead-lettered."). Select None to turn it off. Read more in Delivery Count Monitoring.

Auto-forwarding

The Auto-forwarding evaluation dropdown decides the state when active messages remain on a Topic Subscription with Forward to set: Use configured thresholds, Always OK, Raise Warning, or Raise Error. A quota, dead-letter, or configuration Error still takes precedence. Read more in Forward To for Queues and Topic Subscriptions.

Acknowledge Dead-Letters

Enter a timestamp in Acknowledge dead-letters before:, or click Acknowledge dead-letters up until now. Dead-letter messages before that time report Warning instead of Error, while new dead-letter messages still raise Error. You can also use the Acknowledge dead-letter messages up until now action from the Actions menu.

Available Actions

The following actions are available for managing Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions (and some are identical for Queues):

• Details – View essential information about the selected Service Bus Topic Subscription.
• Edit Thresholds – Configure monitoring thresholds for the selected queue.
• Acknowledge Dead-Letter Messages – Acknowledge dead-letter messages older than now to change the status from Error to Warning.
• Enable – Enable a Service Bus Queue that is currently disabled.
• Disable – Disable a Service Bus Queue that is currently enabled.
• Resubmit and Delete All Dead Letter Messages – Resubmit and delete all dead letter messages in the sub queue.
• List Active Messages – View all messages in the active sub queue.
  • Download - Download the message.
  • View/Repair - View and repair the message.
  • Delete - Delete the message.
  • Purge by Session ID - Purge all messages with the same session ID as the selected message.
  • Move to Dead Letter - Move the message to the Dead-letter sub queue.
  • Resubmit - Resubmit the message to the queue.
  • Resubmit & Delete - Resubmit the message to the queue and delete the original message.
• List Dead Letter Messages – View all dead letter messages in the queue.
  • Download - Download the dead letter message.
  • View/Repair - View and repair the dead letter message.
  • Delete - Delete the dead letter message.
  • Resubmit - Resubmit the message to the active sub queue.
  • Resubmit & Delete - Resubmit the message to the active sub queue and delete the original message.
  • Resubmit to Source - Resubmit the dead letter message to Source.
  • Resubmit to Source and Delete - Resubmit the dead letter message to Source and Delete it.
• Purge Active Messages – Purge all active messages from the active sub queue.
• Purge Dead Letter Messages – Purge all dead letter messages from the dead letter sub queue.

Alert history for Azure Service Bus

During root cause analysis or other purposes, it might be helpful to understand how often your Azure Service Bus problems happen. If your Monitor View allows it, you can search for historical state changes for the provided time span, either for all your Azure Service Bus or individually. This topic is further detailed within the generic instructions on how to Add or manage Monitor View page.

Search for alert history for all resources in the Monitor View	Alert history for the selected app

Frequently asked questions

Use the Troubleshooting guide to find the FAQ and answers to known problems.

How do I grant my users access to Azure Service Bus monitoring?

This is detailed in the User access to Azure Service Bus monitoring guide.

How do I enable monitoring of Azure Service Bus

To Monitor the Azure Service Bus; Check the Enable monitoring for Service Bus checkbox (default is checked). Additional configuration is required; Review the 'User access to Azure Service Bus monitoring' user guide for specifics.

The screenshot below is from the remote configuration form available from the Monitoring Agents administration page.

Example with monitoring for Azure Service Bus resources enabled.

Next Steps

• Managing Azure Service Bus Topic Subscriptions
• Edit thresholds
• Managing Azure Service Bus
• User access to Azure Service Bus monitoring

Related Topics

• Applications
• Categories
• Prerequisites
• Resources
• Forward To for Queues and Topic Subscriptions