Announcing the public preview of Microsoft Graph change notifications delivery via Azure Event Hubs

Vincent Biret

We’re pleased to announce the public preview of an additional delivery mode for Microsoft Graph change notifications. You can now use Azure Events Hubs to receive change notifications instead of traditional webhooks.

Historically, change notifications have used webhooks to let applications receive notifications about changes in Microsoft Graph resource data like Outlook messages, OneDrive files, and more. This delivery mode (HTTP POST) requires subscribers to expose a publicly available notification URL, which can be limiting for two types of scenarios:

  • Solutions that are not able to expose a publicly available URL for security reasons or because they are deployed on premises.
  • Solutions receiving a large volume of change notifications.

Using Azure Event Hubs, a popular real-time events ingestion and distribution service built for scale, to receive change notifications can help by:

  • Removing the need for a publicly exposed notification URL.
  • Allowing high throughput of change notifications.
  • Temporizing the change notifications (in case your service needs to go offline for maintenance, for example).

Change notifications will continue work the same way for authorization, API contract, and SDK support, and only differ in the following points for Azure Event Hubs:

  • You do not need to implement the notification URL validation anymore.
  • You will need to provision an Azure Event Hub.
  • You will need to provision an Azure Key Vault.
  • You will use the Event Hubs SDK to receive the change notifications.

Learn how you can setup change notification delivery via Azure Event Hubs from the documentation and let us know what you think!

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