How to programmatically retrieve msmq statistical counters? - msmq

I have a windows servive installed thatis a MSMQ Listener. I need to get the MSMQ statistical counters programmatically for non transactional response quque.

You might want to have look at the Performance Counters.
I did not use the Performance Counters for MSMQ yet, but I did use them for other things like CPU load. It is not too hard to get into.
(From the first linked article below)
MSMQ performance counters were part of MSMQ since day 1. [...]
Performance counters are easy to approach
through WMI interface, and many monitoring tools interface to them
anyway. However, when using perf. counters you don’t get the most
up-to-date data and they are not always accurate, especially when
looking at remote machine.
Here are a few articles to get you started:
Counting the number of messages in a queue
Monitoring Message Queuing performance
MSMQ Adapter Performance Counters
The first article also mentions the MSMQ Admin API, which I have not yet used. So I personal cannot give any recommendations about it:
MSMQ Admin APIs were introduced with NT4 SP6a (so you probably have
them…) however a COM interface to them was not supplied until MSMQ 3.0
(WXP or W2003). If you have WinNT or Win2K, you will have to use the C
APIs. On the other hand, the results from MSMQ Admin APIs are more
current and reliable.

Here is Code from which you get count of Message queue you just need to pass name of queue for which you want msmq count.
//Here QueueName is Pass from Calling Function for which you want count of messages.
Public MessageCount(string QueueName)
{
int messageCount = 0;
try
{
string fullyQualifiedQueueName = string.Format(#"{0}\{1}", Environment.MachineName, QueueName);
PerformanceCounterCategory category = new PerformanceCounterCategory("MSMQ Queue");
PerformanceCounter cntr = new PerformanceCounter("MSMQ Queue", "Messages in Queue");
if (category.InstanceExists(fullyQualifiedQueueName.ToLower()))
{
cntr.InstanceName = fullyQualifiedQueueName.ToLower(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
messageCount = (int)cntr.NextValue();
}
((IDisposable)cntr).Dispose();
Console.WriteLine("Message Count is {0}", messageCount.Tostring());
}
Catch(Exeption Ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error : {0}",Ex.Message);
}
}

Related

Sorting Service Bus Queue Messages

i was wondering if there is a way to implement metadata or even multiple metadata to a service bus queue message to be used later on in an application to sort on but still maintaining FIFO in the queue.
So in short, what i want to do is:
Maintaining Fifo, that s First in First Out structure in the queue, but as the messages are coming and inserted to the queue from different Sources i want to be able to sort from which source the message came from with for example metadata.
I know this is possible with Topics where you can insert a property to the message, but also i am unsure if it is possible to implement multiple properties into the topic message.
Hope i made my self clear on what i am asking is possible.
I assume you use .NET API. If this case you can use Properties dictionary to write and read your custom metadata:
BrokeredMessage message = new BrokeredMessage(body);
message.Properties.Add("Source", mySource);
You are free to add multiple properties too. This is the same for both Queues and Topics/Subscriptions.
i was wondering if there is a way to implement metadata or even multiple metadata to a service bus queue message to be used later on in an application to sort on but still maintaining FIFO in the queue.
To maintain FIFO in the queue, you'd have to use Message Sessions. Without message sessions you would not be able to maintain FIFO in the queue itself. You would be able to set a custom property and use it in your application and sort out messages once they are received out of order, but you won't receive message in FIFO order as were asking in your original question.
If you drop the requirement of having an order preserved on the queue, the the answer #Mikhail has provided will be suitable for in-process sorting based on custom property(s). Just be aware that in-process sorting will be not a trivial task.

Mongo DB reading 4 million documents

We have Scheduled jobs that runs daily,This jobs looks for matching Documents for that day and takes the document and do minimal transform and sent it a queue for downstream processing. Typically we have 4 millions Documents to be processed for a day. Our aim is to complete the processing within one hour. I am looking for suggestions on the best practices to read 4 million Documents from MongoDB quickly ?
The MongoDB Async driver is the first stop for low overhead querying. There's a good example of using the SingleResultCallback on that page:
Block<Document> printDocumentBlock = new Block<Document>() {
#Override
public void apply(final Document document) {
System.out.println(document.toJson());
}
};
SingleResultCallback<Void> callbackWhenFinished = new SingleResultCallback<Void>() {
#Override
public void onResult(final Void result, final Throwable t) {
System.out.println("Operation Finished!");
}
};
collection.find().forEach(printDocumentBlock, callbackWhenFinished);
It is a common pattern in asynchronous database drivers to allow results to be passed on for processing as soon as they are available. The use of OS-level async I/O will help with low CPU overhead. Which brings up the next problem - how to get the data out.
Without seeing the specifics of your work, you probably want to place the results into an in memory queue to be picked up by another thread at this point so the reader thread can keep reading results. An ArrayBlockingQueue is probably appropriate. put is more appropriate than add because it will block the reader thread if the worker(s) isn't able to keep up (keeping things balanced). Ideally, you don't want it to back up which is where multiple threads will be necessary. If the order of the results is important, use a single worker thread, otherwise use a ThreadPoolExecutor with the queue passed into the constructor. Using the in-memory queue does open up the possibility for data-loss if the results are being somehow discarded as they are read (i.e. if you were immediately sending off another query to delete them), and the reader process crashed.
At this point, either do the 'minimal transforms' on the worker thread(s), or serialize them in the workers and put them on a real queue (e.g. RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ). Putting them onto a real queue allows the work to be divided up amoungst multiple machines trivially, and provides optional persistence allowing recovery of work, and those queues have great clustering options for scalability. Those machines can then put the results into the queue you mentioned in the question (assuming it has the capacity).
The bottleneck in a system like that is how quickly one machine can get through a single mongo query, and how many results the final queue can handle. All the other parts (MongoDB, queues, # of worker machines) are individually scalable. By doing as little work as possible on the querying machine and pushing that work onto other machines that impact can be greatly reduced. It sounds like your destination queue is out of your control.
When trying to work out where bottlenecks are, measurements are critical. Adding metrics to your application up front will let you know which areas need improvement when things aren't going well.
That set-up can build a pretty scalable system. I've built many similar systems before. Beyond that, you'll want to investigate getting your data into something like Apache Storm.

Service Fabric reliable queue long operation

I'm trying to understand some best practices for service fabric.
If I have a queue that is added to by a web service or some other mechanism and a back end task to process that queue what is the best approach to handle long running operations in the background.
Use TryPeekAsync in one transaction, process and then if successful use TryDequeueAsync to finally dequeue.
Use TryDequeueAsync to remove an item, put it into a dictionary and then remove from the dictionary when complete. On startup of the service, check the
dictionary for anything pending before the queue.
Both ways feel slightly wrong, but I can't work out if there is a better way.
One option is to process the queue in RunAsync, something along the lines of this:
protected override async Task RunAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
var store = await StateManager.GetOrAddAsync<IReliableQueue<T>>("MyStore").ConfigureAwait(false);
while (!cancellationToken.IsCancellationRequested)
{
using (var tx = StateManager.CreateTransaction())
{
var itemFromQueue = await store.TryDequeueAsync(tx).ConfigureAwait(false);
if (!itemFromQueue.HasValue)
{
await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), cancellationToken).ConfigureAwait(false);
continue;
}
// Process item here
// Remmber to clone the dequeued item if it is a custom type and you are going to mutate it.
// If success, await tx.CommitAsync();
// If failure to process, either let it run out of the Using transaction scope, or call tx.Abort();
}
}
}
Regarding the comment about cloning the dequeued item if you are to mutate it, look under the "Recommendations" part here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-reliable-services-reliable-collections/
One limitation with Reliable Collections (both Queue and Dictionary), is that you only have parallelism of 1 per partition. So for high activity queues it might not be the best solution. This might be the issue you're running into.
What we've been doing is to use ReliableQueues for situations where the write amount is very low. For higher throughput queues, where we need durability and scale, we're using ServiceBus Topics. That also gives us the advantage that if a service was Stateful only due to to having the ReliableQueue, it can now be made stateless. Though this adds a dependency to a 3rd party service (in this case ServiceBus), and that might not be an option for you.
Another option would be to create a durable pub/sub implementation to act as the queue. I've done tests before with using actors for this, and it seemed to be a viable option, without spending too much time on it, since we didn't have any issues depending on ServiceBus. Here is another SO about that Pub/sub pattern in Azure Service Fabric
If very slow use 2 queues.. One a fast one where you store the work without interruptions and a slow one to process it. RunAsync is used to move messages from the fast to the slow.

MSMQ as a job queue

I am trying to implement job queue with MSMQ to save up some time on me implementing it in SQL. After reading around I realized MSMQ might not offer what I am after. Could you please advice me if my plan is realistic using MSMQ or recommend an alternative ?
I have number of processes picking up jobs from a queue (I might need to scale out in the future), once job is picked up processing follows, during this time job is locked to other processes by status, if needed job is chucked back (status changes again) to the queue for further processing, but physically the job still sits in the queue until completed.
MSMQ doesn't let me to keep the message in the queue while working on it, eg I can peek or read. Read takes message out of queue and peek doesn't allow changing the message (status).
Thank you
Using MSMQ as a datastore is probably bad as it's not designed for storage at all. Unless the queues are transactional the messages may not even get written to disk.
Certainly updating queue items in-situ is not supported for the reasons you state.
If you don't want a full blown relational DB you could use an in-memory cache of some kind, like memcached, or a cheap object db like raven.
Take a look at RabbitMQ, or many of the other messages queues. Most offer this functionality out of the box.
For example. RabbitMQ calls what you are describing, Work Queues. Multiple consumers can pull from the same queue and not pull the same item. Furthermore, if you use acknowledgements and the processing fails, the item is not removed from the queue.
.net examples:
https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-two-dotnet.html
EDIT: After using MSMQ myself, it would probably work very well for what you are doing, as far as I can tell. The key is to use transactions and multiple queues. For example, each status should have it's own queue. It's fairly safe to "move" messages from one queue to another since it occurs within a transaction. This moving of messages is essentially your change of status.
We also use the Message Extension byte array for storing message metadata, like status. This way we don't have to alter the actual message when moving it to another queue.
MSMQ and queues in general, require a different set of patterns than what most programmers are use to. Keep that in mind.
Perhaps, if you can give more information on why you need to peek for messages that are currently in process, there would be a way to handle that scenario with MSMQ. You could always add a database for additional tracking.

Can I filter the messages I receive from a message queue (MSMQ) by some property? (a.k.a. topic)

I am creating a Windows Service in C# that processes messages from a queue. I want to give ops the flexibility of partitioning the service in production according to properties of the message. For example, they should be able to say that one instance processes web orders from Customer A, another batch orders from Customer A, a third web or batch orders from Customer B, and so on.
My current solution is to assign separate queues to each customer\source combination. The process that puts orders into the queues has to make the right decision. My Windows Service can be configured to pull messages from one or more queues. It's messy, but it works.
No, but you can PEEK into the queue and decide if you really want to consume the message.
Use GetMessageEnumerator2() like this:
MessageEnumerator en = q.GetMessageEnumerator2();
while (en.MoveNext())
{
if (en.Current.Label == label)
{
string body = ((XmlDocument)en.Current.Body).OuterXml;
en.RemoveCurrent();
return body;
}
}