Work with Dynamics 365 event data in your Azure Event Hub solution

Article
11/28/2016

Applies To: Dynamics 365 (online), Dynamics 365 (on-premises), Dynamics CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online

Microsoft Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable publish-subscribe service that can ingest millions of events per second and stream them into multiple applications. TheDynamics 365-Azure interface enables your Dynamics 365 event data to be published to the Microsoft Azure Service Bus and made available to your event hub solution subscribers. The following information describes the general tasks that must be completed to send Dynamics 365 event data to an event hub solution.

Note

An Azure subscription and event hub license is required for access to event hubs. This feature was introduced in CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 (on-premises).

1. Create an event hub

You can create an event hub in Microsoft Azure either through API programming or interactively by using the Azure classic portal. Either way, after creating your event hub you must obtain a copy of the event hub connection string and provide that string when registering the Dynamics 365 service endpoint detailed in the next section.

For more information about creating event hubs see the Event Hubs documentation.

2. Register an endpoint

Registering a service endpoint for an event hub is similar to registering for any other supported contract type such as queues or topics. You use the Plug-in Registration Tool, provided in the SDK download, to register the service endpoint. When filling out the registration form specify a contract type of Event Hub. For the message body format, you can choose XML or JSON. In addition, only SAS authorization is permitted and you must provide the connection string obtained when you created the event hub. More information: Walkthrough: Configure Microsoft Azure (SAS) for integration with Dynamics 365.

3. Register code

Microsoft Dynamics 365 needs to know the exact operation (entity/message combination) that, when processed, would cause the Azure-aware plug-in to execute. Since you are creating an event hub, this operation would be related to the processing of Dynamics 365 event data in particular. You must register a step for the Azure-aware plug-in in the Dynamics 365 event execution pipeline. For more information see Walkthrough: Register an Azure-aware plug-in using the Plug-in Registration Tool.

If you are using an Azure-aware custom workflow activity instead of a plug-in, you would register the activity's assembly using the Plug-in Registration Tool and incorporate that activity into a workflow. More information: Sample: Azure aware custom workflow activity.

4. Start listening

Start your Azure service hub solution application listening on the service endpoint.

5. Trigger

Perform an operation in Dynamics 365 that would cause the plug-in or workflow containing the custom workflow activity to execute. This is the same operation (entity/message combination) that you registered the plug-in step for in the previous section of this topic. You can perform the intended operation by using the web application or through application code accessing the Dynamics 365 web services.

6. Verification

You can check the related system job in the Dynamics 365 web application and look for a status of Succeeded. If you find a status of Failed, use the status information to identify the possible cause of the failure. You can then recheck the configurations of both systems or debug application code to locate and fix the problem, depending on the nature of the failure.