A Comprehensive Guide to Azure Event Grid

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service that helps you connect different Azure services and applications. It enables you to react to events from various sources, such as Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Functions.

Event Grid provides a scalable and secure way to manage events, with features like event filtering, dead-letter queues, and event retries. This makes it an ideal choice for building event-driven architectures.

Azure Event Grid supports a wide range of event sources, including Azure services, custom applications, and third-party services. This allows you to integrate different systems and applications, creating a connected and responsive ecosystem.

By using Azure Event Grid, you can simplify event handling and improve the reliability of your applications. With its robust features and scalability, Event Grid helps you build more efficient and resilient systems.

Azure Event Grid is a powerful tool used in various stages of data pipelines to achieve diverse integration goals. It allows IoT devices and applications to communicate with each other over MQTT.

Event Grid can route MQTT messages to Azure services or custom endpoints for further data analysis, visualization, or storage. This integration with Azure services enables you to build data pipelines that start with data ingestion from your IoT devices.

Data from various sources can be sent to Event Grid using HTTP, including Azure services, your custom applications, and external partner systems. These sources can be MQTT clients, Azure services, your custom applications, and external partner systems.

Event Grid uses a push delivery mechanism to send data to destinations like your own application webhooks and Azure services. This is in addition to its pull delivery mode, which allows HTTP applications to consume messages using APIs.

Event Grid supports a wide range of use cases, including custom MQTT topic names using a publish-subscribe messaging model. This allows clients to communicate with each other in a flexible and scalable way.

Event Grid integrates with Azure IoT MQ, a distributed MQTT broker for edge computing, to bridge the gap between edge and cloud computing. This integration enables secure and scalable solutions for connecting millions of vehicles to the cloud.

The MQTT broker feature in Event Grid is ideal for automotive and mobility scenarios, such as connecting vehicles to the cloud for data analysis and visualizations. With this feature, you can build secure and scalable solutions for connecting millions of vehicles.

Event Grid enables clients to publish and subscribe to messages over MQTT v3.1.1, MQTT v3.1.1 over WebSockets, MQTT v5, and MQTT v5 over WebSockets. This support for multiple MQTT versions makes it easy to integrate with existing systems.

To get started with Event Grid, you can use the following scenarios:

Event Grid is designed for high availability, consistent performance, and dynamic scale, making it easy to focus on your app logic rather than infrastructure. With Event Grid, you can simplify your event-based apps and build scalable solutions.

You can receive events from Azure services, such as Azure Storage Account, and automate your operations with Event Grid. This allows your downstream application to read and process the content.

Event Grid can receive events from over 20 Azure services, including Azure Storage Account. You can find a full list of supported Azure services and events in the System topics documentation.

Your own service or application can publish events to Event Grid, which subscriber applications can then process. This is achieved through Namespace Topics, Custom Topics, or Domains.

You have full control over event consumption with Event Grid, allowing you to receive events at your own pace. This means your application can receive events at certain times of the day, or you can increase the rate of consumption by adding more clients.

Event Grid offers a flexible event consumption model using HTTP, which allows for pull or push delivery mode. This means you can consume events in real-time or at your own pace.

You can use Event Grid to receive and process events from a Namespace, using the EventGridConsumerClient's receive function. This allows you to acknowledge, reject, release, or renew locks on events.

Here are the key benefits of using Event Grid for event consumption:

You can also use private links to connect to Azure Event Grid, allowing you to publish and read CloudEvents through a private endpoint in your virtual network. This is available with pull delivery, not push delivery.

Event Grid offers two delivery modes: push and pull. Push delivery is available in both the basic and standard tiers, and it allows you to send events to a diverse set of Azure services or webhooks.

Push delivery is ideal for real-time event processing, and it decouples event publishers from event subscribers using a pub/sub model.

Event Grid's push delivery allows you to send discrete events, and it supports a wide range of event schemas, including CloudEvents and custom schemas.

The EventGridPublisherClient is used to send events to an Event Grid Topic or an Event Grid Domain. It provides operations to send event data to a resource specified during client initialization.

You can send events in various formats, including a list or single instance of strongly typed EventGridEvents, a dict representation of a serialized EventGridEvent object, and a list or single instance of strongly typed CloudEvents.

Event delivery can be simplified with Event Grid, eliminating the need for polling and associated costs and latency.

A namespace topic is a topic created within an Event Grid namespace, and it only supports the CloudEvent v1.0 schema.

If you're sending events to an Event Grid Basic resource, you can use the EventGridPublisherClient to publish events, regardless of the schema configured for the topic or domain.

Here are the allowed formats of events for sending to an Event Grid Basic resource:

For sending events to an Event Grid Namespace resource with a namespace topic specified, the allowed formats are:

You can create an EventGridPublisherClient by providing the endpoint of your Event Grid topic and a credential, which can be an Access Key or Shared Access Signature (SAS) created from an access key.

The endpoint can be found in the Azure Portal or by using the Azure CLI snippet.

To use an Access key as the credential parameter, pass the key as a string into an instance of AzureKeyCredential.

Azure Event Grid provides integration with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for identity-based authentication of requests, allowing you to use role-based access control (RBAC) to grant access to your Azure Event Grid resources to users, groups, or applications.

With Azure AD, you can send events to a topic or domain with a TokenCredential, but the authenticated identity should have the "Event Grid Data Sender" role assigned.

To create an instance of a client, you'll need an endpoint and credential.

You can find the endpoint for your Event Grid topic in the Azure Portal or by using the Azure CLI snippet. The credential can be an Access Key or a Shared Access Signature (SAS) created from an access key.

The default EventGridPublisherClient created is compatible with an Event Grid Basic Resource. To create an Event Grid Namespace compatible client, specify namespace_topic="YOUR_TOPIC_NAME" when instantiating the client.

To use an Access key as the credential parameter, pass the key as a string into an instance of AzureKeyCredential. The Access Key may be found in the azure portal in the "Access Keys" menu of the Event Grid Topic resource.

Azure Event Grid provides integration with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for identity-based authentication of requests. With Azure AD, you can use role-based access control (RBAC) to grant access to your Azure Event Grid resources to users, groups, or applications.

To send events to a topic or domain with a TokenCredential, the authenticated identity should have the "EventGrid Data Sender" role assigned. To receive events from a topic event subscription with a TokenCredential, the authenticated identity should have the "Event Grid Data Receiver" role assigned. To send and receive events to/from a topic with a TokenCredential, the authenticated identity should have the "Event Grid Data Contributor" role assigned.

Here are the roles required for different operations with TokenCredential:

A Service Level Agreement, or SLA, is a promise between you and a service provider that outlines the expected level of service quality. This includes things like uptime, response times, and data security.

Event Grid has its own SLA, which you can review to understand what to expect from their service. The SLA for Event Grid is a critical component of their authentication and security measures.

In general, a well-defined SLA helps to establish trust and clear expectations between parties. It's essential to review and understand the terms of the SLA before signing up for a service like Event Grid.

The Standard Tier of Azure Event Grid is a cost-effective option for those who need more operations than the Basic Tier allows.

You get 1 million operations per month, which is a significant increase from the 100,000 operations you get for free in the Basic Tier.

The pricing for the Standard Tier is also based on pay-per-use, just like the Basic Tier. However, the price per million operations is not specified in the article.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Standard Tier is likely to be more cost-effective for larger operations, but it's hard to say for sure without knowing the price per million operations.

Event Grid offers a rich mixture of features, including capabilities that enable you to develop richer application scenarios by connecting multiple possible sources and destinations of events.

With Event Grid, your business logic can be triggered by virtually all Azure services, as well as custom sources. This allows you to focus on solving business problems rather than infrastructure.

Fully managed event handling with delivery, intelligent filtering, and the ability to send events to multiple recipients at once allow you to streamline your workflow and achieve more with less effort.

Event Grid offers a rich mixture of features, including the ability to connect multiple possible sources and destinations of events.

You can trigger your business logic by virtually all Azure services, as well as custom sources, allowing for greater flexibility.

With Event Grid, you can focus on solving business problems rather than infrastructure, thanks to its fully managed event handling.

This means you can send events to multiple recipients at once, making it easier to handle complex event scenarios.

Event Grid's intelligent filtering feature helps you manage events efficiently, reducing the noise and focusing on the events that matter most.

Distributed Tracing is a powerful feature that helps you understand complex systems by visualizing the flow of data through them. This is especially useful in cloud-based environments where multiple services interact with each other.

You can use OpenTelemetry for Python with Event Grid since it's compatible with azure-core tracing integration. This allows you to track the flow of data as it moves through your system.

OpenTelemetry is a regular tracing plugin for Event Grid, which means you can use it as you normally would. Just set it up and follow the example to start collecting traces.

Any exporter can be used with OpenTelemetry, including azure-monitor-opentelemetry-exporter, jaeger, and zipkin. This gives you flexibility in how you choose to visualize your data.

To get started, simply set up the tracer and exporter, and then follow the example of using the send method from the EventGridClient to send a CloudEvent object.

Troubleshooting can be a real challenge, but don't worry, we've got some tips to help you out.

To start, you can enable the azure.eventgrid logger to collect traces from the library. This will help you identify and fix issues more efficiently.

Event Grid client library will raise exceptions defined in Azure Core, so be aware of that when working with the library.

If you're using the Event Grid client library, you might encounter exceptions, which are defined in Azure Core.