Suthahar Jegatheesan MSDEVBUILD / blog Multi-Stack Dev Build · by Suthahar
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The queue drained. Nothing was consuming it.

One Service Bus default, six hours, and 4,318 orders that never existed.

What you'll learn

  • How a message TTL deletes orders with no error and no log line
  • Why a queue draining with no consumer is deletion, not recovery
  • The three queue properties and one alert that would have caught it
Azure 10 steps 32 seconds —views

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Understand it one step at a time

The short runs these in order in about 32 seconds. Here they are written out — pick any step to jump the short straight to it.

1 Step 1 of 10

09:12 — the deploy goes out

Three instances of orders-worker roll out, health checks green, the Service Bus consumer connects cleanly. An ordinary Tuesday morning.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to a Service Bus message when its TTL expires?
By default, nothing gets logged — the message is simply deleted. EnableDeadLetteringOnMessageExpiration defaults to false, so unless you turn it on, an expired message disappears with no error and no trace, not a safety net.
How do you know a queue is silently losing messages instead of recovering?
A queue depth draining to zero looks identical whether consumers processed everything or the broker just expired and deleted it. The property to check — and alert on — is dead-letter queue depth, not just active queue depth.

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These are built for a phone

Every short is drawn at full portrait height, the shape a phone already is. Installed, it opens full-bleed with no address bar across the top — and the whole library reads offline.

How it works

Read deeper on Azure

Twenty seconds gets the shape of an idea across. These go into how it behaves in production.

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