11 reasons why Serverless360 is the best alternative to Service Bus Explorer
Below are the strong reasons why Serverless360 should be chosen over Service Bus Explorer
1. One Tool to Manage and Monitor Serverless Applications
In real time Azure Serverless services are put together to build orchestrations those solve critical business needs. What is required is a management and monitoring solution for these applications. Why to juggle between Service Bus Explorer for management and Azure portal for monitoring. Get almost everything required at one place – Serverless360.
2. Much broader Scope
Scope of Serverless360 is much broader when compared with Service Bus Explorer. Service Bus Explorer is restricted to managing Service Bus, Event Hub and Relay namespaces and entities. However, Serverless360 offers management and monitoring capabilities for Logic Apps, Function Apps, Event Grid, Storage Account, Web App along with Service Bus, Event Hub, Relay. This list is continuously expanded to accommodate all Azure Serverless Services.
3. Out of box Message Processing options
One key purpose of Service Bus Explorer is processing the messages in Service Bus Queues and Topics. Serverless360 offers much better message processing capabilities. View and process Active and Dead Lettered messages. Resubmit or Repair and Resubmit or Delete with option to back up messages to an associated storage blob. Deferred mode of message processing ensures the messages are not lost due to any network outage or if a user doesn’t perform resubmission after receiving the message from the dead letter queue. Also, download a copy of the Service Bus messages in compressed file format.
4. Automate message processing with Scheduled Activities
Process active and dead lettered messages in the Service Bus queues or topics with scheduled activities. Schedule purging of dead letter messages at specified times in a day on recurrence, automatically resubmit messages to another destination periodically. Simulate real-time test environment using send messages activity for Service Bus Queues and Topics. Send events activities for Event Hubs and Event Grid Topics.
5. No more concerns sharing Connection Strings with distributed team
Concerned about sharing the namespace connection string with manage claims with the Support team to manage the Service Bus, Event Hub or Relay entities? Serverless360 provides much secure access to Support team on the Azure entities. Associate entities through Service Principals or namespace connection strings and provide only necessary access to the team members Managing the access keys becomes central and need not share them with other or redistribute whenever regenerated.
6. Not just a Service Bus Management Tool
Scope of Serverless360 is much beyond Service Bus Explorer. Later is built just for managing Service Bus, Event Hub and Relay. With Serverless360, manage entity properties, define Topic subscription rules, import Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relays from one namespace to another, manage shared access policies, process messages in Service Bus, Storage Queues and Event Grid Subscriptions and do much more on monitoring these entities too.
7. Azure Serverless Monitoring and Reporting
Serverless360 is not just a management tool, it comes with variety of monitors to enable monitoring Azure Serverless Applications in various perspectives. Serverless360 provides a consolidated report on all the Azure entities those participate in the business.
8. Keep stakeholders informed through Notification Channels
Serverless360 supports a wide range of Notification channels like Pager Duty, Slack, OMS, Microsoft Teams along with Webhook and email channels for keeping the stakeholders informed on the entity monitoring status.
9. Manage Teams with need only permission
Business needs would demand teams to manage and monitor Serverless Applications. It is required to define a granular user access policy on these applications to the team members. Serverless360 provides convenient User Management with the option to integrate Azure Active Directory too. There is no user management or restricted access in Service Bus Explorer.
10. Continuous Improvement with dedicated Customer Support
Serverless360 is continuously improved with expansion in the scope of Azure services those can be managed and monitored. We pride ourselves in providing excellent customer service. As you intend to manage and monitor your Azure Serverless Applications in production, the right choice would be a commercial platform over a community tool.
11. Prefer SaaS or Web App over Desktop executable
One of the primary challenges faced by users of Service Bus Explorer is that it is a Desktop executable. Upgrading or redistributing latest version of the executable to all team members, exporting the configuration and distributing access keys/connection strings is quite difficult.
There is always a possibility that the application goes unresponsive. For some tasks like message retrieval or resubmission, there is a possibility that application hangs and messages are lost.
How nice it would be to manage your team members by allowing them controlled access to a web application, the security and management become easy. The updates are available for all at the same time and taken care of by the platform provider. The team just focuses on their day to day business activities.
Serverless360 is crafted with capabilities to complement the Azure portal
This article would substantiate the above points with technical proofs and provide the reader clarity on why to choose Serverless360 over Service Bus Explorer.
Quick Overview
| Serverless360 | Service Bus Explorer | |
|---|---|---|
| What are these tools? | Serverless360 is a One platform for Azure Serverless monitoring and management. In real time scenario, the integrated cloud applications are not built with single technology stack, it typically involves multiple Azure Services. Currently, Azure Portal is designed more on vertical technology silos and it's difficult to visualize and manage such connected solutions. Serverless360 is one tool that you can depend for Azure Serverless monitoring and management from one place. Serverless360 is crafted with capabilities to complement the Azure Portal. | The Service Bus Explorer allows users to connect to a Service Bus namespace and administer messaging entities in an easy manner. The tool provides advanced features like import/export functionality or the ability to test topic, queues, subscriptions, relay services, notification hubs and events hubs. |
| Who are the target users? | Azure Monitor is also for Azure Developers and DevOps teams. | |
| What do they offer in a nutshell? | Extensive Toolset to manage and variety of monitors to offer Consolidated monitoring on Composite Applications which represent the business solution. | Tooling to administer messaging entities. |
| How much do they cost? | This is a community tool. |
What can be monitored?
Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relays are the Azure services those can be managed using both Service Bus Explorer and Serverless360 as of now. Read further for more details on the how Serverless360 can manage and monitor all those entities that can be managed using Service Bus Explorer but not restricted to them.
Logically group entities from different Azure subscriptions, regions and resource groups in Serverless360 Composite Applications to represent your business solution.
Following is a detailed comparison on feature set of Serverless360 Vs Service Bus Explorer. Let us analyse the tools in multiple parameters to choose the best.
Associating Entities
The biggest concern in managing entities using Service Bus Explorer is it requires to share the namespace connection string of Service Bus, Event Hub or Relay that needs to be managed. This connection string is expected to have manage claims. This is a trouble when it gets into the hands of person with no enough knowledge on the entities.
What is required in real time is the entity association should be done once for all users by the authorized person. Granular User Access Policy (UAP) should be in place to restrict user actions on entities.
This is possible using Serverless360. Associate entities either using Service principals or namespace connection strings once for all the users in the Serverless360 account.
Define custom role with granular user access policy and manage users invited using email or from the associated Azure Active Directory.
Usability
Service Bus Explorer facilitates managing Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relays as entities. In real time, these entities come together to build a business application. What is required for better usability is an application view of these entities.
Group Azure entities not restricted to Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relays but also Logic Apps, Function Apps, Event Grid, Web App and Storage Account from different Azure subscriptions and regions into a Composite Application that represents the business solution.
Service Bus Message Processing
Message processing on Service Bus is one key usage of Service Bus Explorer. We should admit Serverless360 was initially built being inspired by this capability of Service Bus Explorer. Serverless360 has got much improved message processing capabilities for Service Bus Queues and Topic subscriptions.
| Use Case | Can be achieved using Serverless360? | Can be achieved using Service Bus Explorer? |
|---|---|---|
| Purge Active messages in a Service Bus Queue or Topic Subscription | Yes, user can purge active messages in the Queue or Topic Subscription. This action can be automated using scheduled Activities with options to filter messages by enqueue time and count | Yes, user can manually purge all active messages, but no filter options and scheduling are available. |
| Purge Dead Letter messages in a Service Bus Queue or Topic Subscription | Purge Dead Letter messages in a Service Bus Queue or Topic Subscription Yes, can filter Dead Lettered messages by enqueue time and count and purge them manually. Can be scheduled as an activity too Yes, user can manually purge all Dead Lettered messages. No filter options available. No Scheduling option available. | Yes, user can manually purge all Dead Lettered messages. No filter options available. No Scheduling option available. |
| Retrieve Active Messages in a Service Bus Queue or Topic Subscription | Yes, retrieve active messages in Peek Lock mode, specific count and from specified sequence number. Active messages can be retrieved in Defer mode too. | Yes, retrieve active messages in Peek or Receive and Delete mode all or count of messages. |
| Retrieve Dead Lettered messages in a Service Bus Queue or Topic Subscription | Yes, Peek specific count of Dead Lettered messages from specified sequence number or defer specified count of messages. | Retrieve Dead Lettered messages in a Service Bus Queue or Topic Subscription Yes, Peek specific count of Dead Lettered messages from specified sequence number or defer specified count of messages. Yes, retrieve all or specified count of Dead Lettered messages in in Peek or Receive and Delete mode. |
| Get Transfer Dead Lettered Queue messages | Not possible | Possible to retrieve transfer dead lettered messages |
| Process Active or Dead Lettered messages in Service Bus Queues and Topics | Process Active or Dead Lettered messages in Service Bus Queues and Topics Yes, perform operations on Active and Dead Lettered messages like, Resubmit Repair and Resubmit (modify content, custom properties) Delete. Provides intelligent suggestions to prevent message loss while resubmitting message to ‘Require Duplicate Detection’ property enabled Service Bus entity. | Not possible |
Access and Process Active or Dead Lettered Messages in Service Bus Queues or Topics manually or using Automated Activities in Serverless360
Manage Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relays
Another key purpose of Service Bus Explorer is the Service Bus, Event Hubs and Relay management. Managing these entities is also possible in Serverless360. Below is a battle card on the management capabilities from Serverless360 and Service Bus Explorer.
| Use Case | What can be achieved using Serverless360? | Can be achieved using Service Bus Explorer? |
|---|---|---|
| Service Bus | ||
| Create Service Bus Queues or Topics | Yes | Yes |
| Redefine properties of Service Bus Queues and Topics | Possible | Possible |
| Manage Shared Access Policy | Yes, create, regenerate keys, delete shared access policies. | Yes (delete, regenerate key is not possible) |
| Templates to clone Service Bus Queues or Topics | Serverless360 supports saving Service Bus properties as templates which can be used to quick create Service Bus entities | Not possible |
| Event Hubs | ||
| Create Event Hubs | Yes | Yes |
| Delete Event Hubs | Yes | Yes |
| Disable Event Hubs | Yes | Yes |
| Refresh Event Hubs | Yes | Yes |
| Send Events | Yes, send Events manually or use automated activities to simulate real time environment | Yes (send events from UI/ file/ Generator) |
| Templates to clone Service Bus Queues or Topics | Serverless360 supports saving Event Hub properties as templates which can be used to quick create Event Hubs | Not possible |
| Relay | ||
| Create Relays | Yes, supports creation of WCF Relay and Hybrid Connection and relay type can be NetTCP or Http. This is in sync with the present Azure portal. | Yes, does not support Hybrid connection. Relay type can be NetTCP, Http, NetEvent, NetOneWay |
| View Relays | View WCF or Hybrid relays | Hybrid relays are not supported |
| Delete Relays | Yes | Yes |
| Copy Relay URL | Not possible | Yes |
| Export Relay | Not possible | Yes |
| Test Relay in SDI mode | Not possible | Yes |
| Test Relay in MDI mode | Not possible | Yes |
| Templates to clone Service Bus Queues or Topics | Serverless360 supports saving Relay properties as templates which can be used to quick create Relay | Not possible |
Achieve much more with Serverless360 monitoring for Azure Serverless services
The following section briefs on what more can be achieved using Serverless360 monitoring solutions for Azure Serverless Applications
Monitor Azure Serverless Applications
In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor Azure Serverless applications. Composite Applications in Serverless360, can logically group Azure entities those participate in a business solution. With necessary monitoring configurations in place get instant feedback if the Composite app is in healthy state or error state.
Logically group entities from different Azure subscriptions, regions and resource groups in Serverless360 Composite Applications to represent your business solution.
Get Consolidated Report
Consider a business orchestration that involves entities like Service Bus Queue, Topic, Logic App and Azure Function. The need here is to get to know the status of all these resources as a single consolidated report.
Serverless360 provides a consolidated report on all the entities associated with the monitor, with a comprehensive view of the status of all the entities at one place. Find below a single report of Azure monitor for an entity on the left and the consolidated report from Serverless360 on the right.
Serverless360 enables monitoring Azure Serverless entities in various perspectives
Status/Health Monitor
In Azure Portal, it is not possible to monitor entities based on properties at required intervals.
To overcome this challenge Serverless360 comes with the solution called Status Monitor. Status monitor can get a consolidated report on the health status of all the entities in a Serverless Application at regular frequency say every two hours in a day.
Comprehensive overview of application health in a consolidated report from Serverelss360
Violation Monitor
Azure monitor cannot detect violation in the state or property of an Azure entity, which can be accomplished using Serverless360 Threshold Monitor.
Detect violation, even if on of the entities in a business application does not meet the criteria
Data Monitor for Anomaly Detection
Data Monitoring Service Bus, Event Hub and Relay can enable monitoring on various perspectives:
- Check if the entity is available by monitoring Server errors
- Evaluate client application efficiency by monitoring User errors
- Ensure client devices are active by monitoring Incoming messages
- and much more
Topic Subscription/Event Hub Partition Monitoring
In Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor Topic Subscriptions and Event Hubs partitions on their state or properties. In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor both Topic Subscriptions and Event Hubs partitions on critical properties like message counts.
Relay Monitoring
In Azure portal, it is not possible to monitor Relays, Hybrid Relay or WCF Relay. In Serverless360, it is possible to monitor both Hybrid Relay and WCF Relay based on the metrics in a Data Monitor and listener count in Status or Threshold monitor.
Serverless360 covers all capabilities offered by Service Bus Explorer and extends to effective User management, Governance & Audit and out of box monitoring solutions too. When it comes to Azure Serverless Monitoring and Management, Serverless360 is the clear choice.