Message Replay Configuration

Message replay allows published Guaranteed messages, and Direct messages promoted to Guaranteed, that were not rejected-to-publisher for any reason, to be stored in a replay log for an indefinite period after being received in case they need to be replayed at some later date. Messages are kept in the replay log until it's full, at which point, the oldest messages are discarded to free up space for new ones.

You can initiate replay log playback for an endpoint from either the event broker, or from clients who have at least consume privileges for the endpoint, which causes a filtered subset of the logged messages to be sent to those clients.

For more information about message replay, see the following information:

Instructions on using Solace CLI commands associated with message replay , which you can find in these sections.

For instructions to set up and use message replay in Broker Manager, see Configuring Message Replay.

Next Steps

From here there are a few different paths you can take depending on what you want to learn:

Deployment Notes

Supported PubSub+ Products

Message replay is supported on the following Solace PubSub+ products:

  • Solace PubSub+ 3530 and 3560 appliances
  • Solace PubSub+ software event brokers
  • Solace PubSub+ Cloud event broker services (Controlled Availability)

Advisories

You should be aware of the following message replay characteristics:

  • Message replay consumes event broker processing resources because it needs to maintain the replay log, handle retrieval and replay of messages, and trim the replay log when it's full.
  • Slow disks negatively impact message replay performance.
  • Replication with message replay isn't supported.

Terminology

The following table presents definitions of terms that are commonly used in message replay discussions.

Term Description

live message

A published message that has not been sent to all consuming clients. It exists somewhere in the datapath; that is, it was either received on ingress, sent via egress, or exists in one or more endpoints.

replayable message

A live message that is received on a Message VPN that has message replay enabled

logged message

A replayable message that is available in the replay log for later replay

replaying endpoint

An endpoint that is currently receiving logged messages from the replay log

replayed message

A logged message that matches a replaying endpoint's subscriptions and has been added to the endpoint.

replay to endpoint

The process of adding a logged message to a replaying endpoint, thereby creating a replayed message instance on the replaying endpoint

replay log trimming

The process of automatically deleting the oldest messages from the replay log to make room for new live data

Types of Replay Requests

A message replay request can be initiated for an endpoint by either a client application using a PubSub+ Messaging API when it binds to a Guaranteed endpoint, or from Broker Manager, Solace CLI or SEMP. In either case, message replay supports the following types of playback requests:

Start replay from the beginning of the log
The requester specifies that the playback is to start from the oldest message in the replay log. All messages in the replay log that match the endpoint’s subscriptions are delivered to the endpoint.
Start replay from date
The requester specifies the date and time from which the playback is to start. Any messages in the replay log equal to, or newer than, the specified date and time that match the endpoint’s subscriptions are delivered to the endpoint.
Start replay from replication group message ID
The requester specifies a replication group message ID after which the playback is to start. Any messages in the replay log received after the specified replication group message ID that match the endpoint's subscriptions are delivered to the endpoint.

In all cases, once the replay has caught up to the live data stream, message delivery switches to live message delivery from the endpoint.

Lifecycle of a Replayable Message

Let's walk though the lifecycle of a replayable message. A couple of points to keep in mind is that the lifecycle is the same for both Types of Replay Requests, and in each of the following lifecycle phases the underlined passages correspond to terms in the Terminology section.

  1. A live message is received on a Message VPN that has message replay enabled. This message is considered to be a replayable message.
    • Instructions on how to create a replay log with Solace CLI are shown in Create or Delete a replay-log.
    • Instructions on how to enable a replay log with the Solace CLI no shutdown command are shown in shutdown.
  2. The message is successfully spooled to all its non-replaying destinations, gets added to the replay log, and is now considered to be a logged message.
  3. At some time later the event broker receives a replay request with a start time that includes the logged message. Once the replay gets to the logged message, and successfully performs replay to endpoint, it's considered a replayed message.
  4. Finally, the replayed message is delivered to a consumer and is acknowledged, which removes it from the replaying endpoint; however, it's still in the replay log until it gets trimmed.

Replaying to an Endpoint

Replaying logged messages occurs on a per-endpoint basis, and can be initiated using PubSub+ Broker Manager, SEMP, Solace CLI commands, or by a client application using a PubSub+ Messaging API when it binds to a endpoint. As described in Types of Replay Requests, a replay request can initiate the playback of all the logged messages, all messages after a given replication group message ID, or start from a given date and time, with the condition that if a start date and time are provided, they must not be for some future date and time. In all cases, all clients bound to the replaying endpoint are disconnected, except the client requesting the replay if done through a bind request.

Topic Matching

All logged messages from the playback start time are processed, and the event broker attempts to match their topics with the replaying endpoint subscriptions. When there's a match, the event broker replays the logged message to the replaying endpoint, and it sends the original message as it was received, without modification. It sends the original topic, content, and message ID. The event broker doesn't mark the message as redelivered in any way.

Windowing

Windowing is used while replaying messages to the replaying endpoint. This means that only a certain number of messages are replayed to the endpoint before the event broker waits for a replayed message to be consumed from the replaying endpoint.

Endpoint already undergoing a replay?

Initiating a replay on an endpoint already under replay cancels the previous replay and starts a new one.

Live messages being received at an endpoint undergoing replay?

Live messages received with a replaying endpoint as a destination undergo all the usual checks against the replaying endpoint as it would do if it wasn't replaying. Once all the checks have passed, the message isn't spooled to the endpoint, but is spooled to the replay log - it will be replayed later once the replay catches up to the message.

Message gets nacked to the publisher?

A message that gets nacked to the publisher doesn't get logged to the replay log.

Replaying to Exclusive Queues

Replaying to any exclusive queue whose active consumer is using an egress selector to filter messages is not recommended. If an egress selector is used, and it causes replayed messages to stay indefinitely on a replaying endpoint, the replay won't complete.

Replaying to Temporary Endpoints

In event broker version 10.0.0 and later, you can replay to a temporary topic endpoint or temporary queue provided that you configure the event broker appropriately. For more information, see Enable Replay on Temporary Queues.

Replay States

Endpoints display one of the following replay states:

State Description

N/A

Message replay has never been requested for the endpoint.

Complete

The last requested replay has finished and no replay is in progress.

Initializing

A message replay has been requested and will begin after all live messages have been removed from the endpoint.

Active

Message replay is in progress. The endpoint is currently receiving messages from the replay log.

Pending Complete

Message replay has reached the end of the replay log but there are still unacknowledged replayed messages on the endpoint. New live messages are being delivered to the endpoint. However, replay can still fail, in which case the unacknowledged replayed messages would be deleted from the endpoint.

Failed

A replay has failed and is the endpoint is waiting for acknowledgment of the unbind request it sent to the event broker as a failure indication.

Trimming the Replay Log

As the replay log grows larger and and reaches the configured capacity, older logged messages are deleted to make room for new ones. This process is called replay log trimming.

Automatic trimming happens when the replay log grows beyond its configured max-spool-usage. Trimming always deletes from the oldest logged message.

It's also possible to manually request trimming with Solace CLI by using the trim-logged-messages command. A date and time must be provided, which will trim the log from the oldest message, excluding the one with the provided date and time.

Direct Messages and Message Replay

Message replay is intended to be used for Guaranteed messages. Direct messages that aren't promoted to Guaranteed are not logged. Therefore, if there's a possibility that your messages might need to be replayed, they should be published as Guaranteed.

Be careful when promoting Direct messages because it can dramatically affect the event broker's performance and if the event broker's Guaranteed message budget is exceeded, the Direct messages will not be logged. If you have Direct messages that you want to record in the replay log, Solace recommends changing the publisher to use Guaranteed messages.