How to check if a Azure Service Bus has Premium Pricing

Question

In one of my Azure Web Apps I create an Azure Topic when it doesn't exist yet during the warmup(start) of our Azure Web App.

On topic creation time I want to know whether the service bus has a premium pricing tier, when yes I want to disable express, when no (standard pricing tier) I want to enable express, to prevent exceptions.

Is there a defensive way to check if a premium pricing tier is available on the service bus (for example: using the service bus connection string) ?

When there is no defensive way, I can always catch the web exception that know raises, but I want to prevent the exception if I can.

Edit: After consulting our lead-dev we decided to skip the EnableExpress setting completely in our DTAP. So I don't need to implement the SKU check at all. Be aware to not set the EnableExpress property at all otherwise you get the webexception in Premium SKU.

Do you want to check the service bus sku? If it is that case, we could get the service bus price tier with SDK . — Tom Sun - MSFT, Aug 31 '17 at 06:31
@TomSun: what do you mean with 'we could get the service bus price tier with SDK ' — Patrick Peters, Aug 31 '17 at 06:50
We could get the servicebus price tier with [Microsoft.Azure.Management.Fluent SDK](https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Azure.Management.Fluent). I have updated the code in the answer. — Tom Sun - MSFT, Aug 31 '17 at 07:10

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 31 '17 at 06:24

Is there a defensive way to check if a premium pricing tier is available on the service bus (for example: using the service bus connection string)?

Unfortunately there's none as of today. Service Bus Client SDK does not expose this information. This feature has been asked from the Service Bus team and there's an open issue on Github for that: https://github.com/Azure/azure-service-bus/issues/42.

The differences between Premium and Standard tiers are highlighted here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/service-bus-premium-messaging. Kind of an anti-pattern but one thing you could do is perform and operation that is only available in Premium tier (say sending a message greater than 256KB in size) and catch the exception (or lack of) to determine if the Service Bus tier is Premium or not.

the last action is by creating the topic/queue and catch on the webexception and perform a retry with EnableExpress explicitly false. — Patrick Peters, Aug 31 '17 at 06:48
Yes, you could do that. But in this case you will end up with lots of topics/queues when there's no exception. With message, you can set the message TTL very low so that this message gets deleted immediately after sent to the queue/topic in case there's no exception. — Gaurav Mantri, Aug 31 '17 at 06:50

Tom Sun - MSFT · Answer 2 · 2017-08-31T07:16:27.733

If we want to check the Azure Service Bus Pricing tier,we could use the following code with Microsoft.Azure.Management.Fluent SDK.

 var credentials = SdkContext.AzureCredentialsFactory.FromFile(@"c:\tom\azureCredential.txt");
 var azure = Azure
            .Configure()
            .WithLogLevel(HttpLoggingDelegatingHandler.Level.Basic)
            .Authenticate(credentials)
            .WithDefaultSubscription();

 var serviceBus =  azure.ServiceBusNamespaces.GetByResourceGroup("resourcegroup", "servicebusnamespace");
 var priceTier = serviceBus.Sku.Tier;

Before code we need to create an azure active directory application and assign the correspondent role. We could create the azure credential file following the document. The following is the credential file format.

subscription=########-####-####-####-############
client=########-####-####-####-############
tenant=########-####-####-####-############
key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
managementURI=https\://management.core.windows.net/
baseURL=https\://management.azure.com/
authURL=https\://login.windows.net/
graphURL=https\://graph.windows.net/

Tom .... You may want to mention in your answer that you're using Azure Management Fluent library which is different than Azure Service Bus SDK and your code makes use of ARM API to get this information. — Gaurav Mantri, Aug 31 '17 at 07:04

How to check if a Azure Service Bus has Premium Pricing

2 Answers2