AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Configure and Manage Azure Event Hubs

Azure Event Hubs is a fully managed, real-time data ingestion service designed to handle large streams of events. An Event Hubs namespace acts as a container that holds one or more Event Hubs, each serving as a scalable event buffer. You can secure and isolate traffic by configuring network settings like IP filters, virtual networks, and Private Link, which ensures clear separation and control over your data streams.

To handle high volumes of data, you allocate partitions and set up throughput units or processing units. Partitions allow for parallel processing of messages, boosting both ingress and egress capacity. Throughput units control how much data you can send and receive per second, and you can scale them up or down. You also define a retention policy to keep events for a set number of days, after which older data automatically ages out.

Event Hubs Capture is a built-in feature that moves streaming data into Azure Storage or Data Lake in Apache Avro or Parquet formats. You configure capture windows by time or size, and each partition writes separate files. The captured data then feeds into analytics tools like Azure Stream Analytics or Data Factory. Capture offloads storage work from your processing units, reduces costs, and simplifies data retention for later analysis.

To secure and monitor your Event Hubs, you use several authentication methods and monitoring tools. Authentication options include:

• Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens
• Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration
• Managed identities
  Supported protocols such as AMQP, HTTPS, and Kafka let you connect with different client types. You track performance with built-in metrics and diagnostic logs, and you can set alerts for message latency, throughput, and error rates using tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Metrics Explorer.

Conclusion

In this section, you learned how to set up and manage Azure Event Hubs by creating namespaces, configuring partitions, and allocating throughput units. You also saw how to control data retention through policies and use Event Hubs Capture to archive streaming data for analytics.

Finally, you explored authentication methods like SAS tokens and Azure AD, as well as protocols such as AMQP and Kafka. Monitoring with Azure Monitor and diagnostic logs helps you keep Event Hubs running smoothly and ensures your data pipelines remain reliable.