What is Azure Event Grid?

Event Grid is a highly scalable, serverless event broker that you can use to integrate applications using events. Events are delivered by Event Grid to subscriber destinations such as applications, Azure services, or any endpoint to which Event Grid has network access. The source of those events can be other applications, SaaS services and Azure services.

With Event Grid you connect solutions using event-driven architectures. An event-driven architecture uses events to communicate occurrences in system state changes, for example, to other applications or services. You can use filters to route specific events to different endpoints, multicast to multiple endpoints, and make sure your events are reliably delivered.

Azure Event Grid is deployed to maximize availability by natively spreading across multiple fault domains in every region, and across availability zones (in regions that support them)

The event sources and event handlers or destinations are summarized in the following diagram.

Note

This image shows how Event Grid connects sources and handlers and isn't a comprehensive list of supported integrations. For a list of all supported event sources, see the following section.

Event sources

Event Grid supports the following event sources:

1. Your own service or solution that publishes events to Event Grid so that your customers can subscribe to them. Event Grid provides two type of resources you can use depending on your requirements.

o Custom Topics or "Topics" for short. Use custom topics if your requirements resemble the following user story:

"As an owner of a system, I want to communicate my system's state changes by publishing events and routing those events to event handlers, under my control or otherwise, that can process my system's events in a way they see fit."

o Domains. Use domains if you want to deliver events to multiple teams at scale. Your requirements probably are similar to the following one:

"As an owner of a system, I want to announce my system’s state changes to multiple teams in a single tenant so that they can process my system’s events in a way they see fit."

2. A SaaS provider or platform can publish their events to Event Grid through a feature called Partner Events. You can subscribe to those events and automate tasks, for example. Events from the following partners are currently available:

o Auth0

o Microsoft Graph API. Through Microsoft Graph API you can get events from Microsoft Outlook, Teams, Azure AD, SharePoint, Conversations, security alerts, and Universal Print.

3. An Azure service. The following Azure services support sending events to Event Grid. For more information about a source in the list, select the link.

• Azure API Management

• Azure App Configuration

• Azure App Service

• Azure Blob Storage

• Azure Cache for Redis

• Azure Communication Services

• Azure Container Registry

• Azure Event Hubs

• Azure FarmBeats

• Azure Health Data Services

• Azure IoT Hub

• Azure Key Vault

• Azure Kubernetes Service

• Azure Machine Learning

• Azure Maps

• Azure Media Services

• Azure Policy

• Azure resource groups

• Azure Service Bus

• Azure SignalR

• Azure subscriptions

Event handlers

For full details on the capabilities of each handler and related articles, see event handlers. Currently, the following Azure services support handling events from Event Grid:

• Webhooks. Azure Automation runbooks and Logic Apps are supported via webhooks.

• Azure functions

• Event Hubs

• Service Bus queues and topics

• Relay hybrid connections

• Storage queues

• Partner destinations

Concepts

There are five concepts in Azure Event Grid that let you get going:

• Events - What happened.

• Event sources - Where the event took place.

• Topics - The endpoint where publishers send events.

• Event subscriptions - The endpoint or built-in mechanism to route events, sometimes to more than one handler. Subscriptions are also used by handlers to intelligently filter incoming events.

• Event handlers - The app or service reacting to the event.

Capabilities

Here are some of the key features of Azure Event Grid:

• Simplicity - Point and click to aim events from your Azure resource to any event handler or endpoint.

• Advanced filtering - Filter on event type or event publish path to make sure event handlers only receive relevant events.

• Fan-out - Subscribe several endpoints to the same event to send copies of the event to as many places as needed.

• Reliability - 24-hour retry with exponential backoff to make sure events are delivered.

• Pay-per-event - Pay only for the amount you use Event Grid.

• High throughput - Build high-volume workloads on Event Grid.

• Built-in Events - Get up and running quickly with resource-defined built-in events.

• Custom Events - Use Event Grid to route, filter, and reliably deliver custom events in your app.

What can I do with Event Grid?

Azure Event Grid provides several features that vastly improve serverless, ops automation, and integration work: