Azure Auto-scaling Queue includes Dead Letter

Question

I have a worker role with auto-scaling turned on according to queue length on a Service Bus queue. I noticed that my role instances seem to stay scaled up even where there are 0 active items in the queue but several in the dead letter queue.

The metric "Length" on the old portal graph includes the dead letter items. However, it doesn't make sense that the system would scale based on dead letters.

Does anyone know if there is an official statement or documentation on this?

Answer 1

You could leverage auto-forwarding to centralize all of your DLQed messages. This will ensure that your source queues/subscription only contain the messages to be processed. That way your cloud service can scale accurately, based on the number of messages to be processed, without counting DLQed messages in.

Note: your messages will be moved to a centralized DLQ, but will still contain information about source queue. You'll find more info here .