Last modified: Nov 21, 2022

Queues

Guidelines for working with Azure Queue Storage

Moving messages between queues

During operations we sometimes need to move messages between queues. The most common scenario is wanting to re-process elements that have ended in the poison queue after too many failed attempts.

Prerequisites

How to

  1. Open Storage Explorer. If you are working towards a test or production environment you must
    • Sign into Azure under the Account Management tab
    • select the storage account you want to work with
  2. Move to the Explorer tab and identify the source queue in the left hand menu

    Poison queue marked in red

  3. You should now see the messages in the queue in the explorer. If you only want to move a single message, this should be highlighted

    Poision queue with elements

  4. Click the arrow next to Move messages to specify if all or just a single message should be moved
  5. In the dialogue, select the destination queue and click Move

    Select destination queue dialogue

  6. The messages will be moved immediatly. Check the destination queue to confirm.

Manually adding messages in queue

Manually adding a message to a queue is useful both when testing new functionality and during incident management.

You have two options when manually adding a message to a Storage Queue, the Azure Portal or Azure Storage Explorer.

Prerequisites

How to (Azure Portal)

  1. Log onto the Azure Portal and identify the correct Storage Account
  2. Select Queues in the left hand menu and identify the queue to work with

    Azure Portal Storage account overview

  3. Click the queue you want to work with
  4. In the overview page of the queue click Add message

    Add message button

  5. Paste your message into the dialogue box, in our case it’s often a json document

    Add message dialogue

  6. Ensure that Encode the message body in Base64 is checked
  7. Click OK

How to (Storage Explorer)

  1. Open Storage Explorer. If you are working towards a test or production environment you must
    • Sign into Azure under the Account Management tab
    • select the storage account you want to work with
  2. Move to the Explorer tab and identify the queue you want to work with in the left hand menu

    Add message button marked in Storage Explorer

  3. Once selected, click Add message in the top ribbon
  4. Add the message in the dialogue box, in our case it’s often a json document

    Add message dialogue in Storage Explorer

  5. Ensure encoding is set to Base64 and click ok