Sitecore Remote event not consumed by CD servers in AKS setup

Question

We have a custom functionality where a job triggers remote events to execute it. I see the event in the event queue table but its NOT consumed by any of the CD pods in AKS.

It works fine in the environment where there is single CD pod, but NOT when there are multiple Pods. Can you please suggest what could be missing ?

I see a file named InstanceName.config which is looking for an environment variable $(env:Sitecore_InstanceName)

Currently we are not settings this.Could it be the issue?

Also I am not sure if there should be a unique value for all the pods or it should be same for all.

Any idea?

Answer 1

The property InstanceName is a very importnat piece of configuration when it comes to sitecore events.

Sitecore Events

If you look in the Properties table of the web database (linked to your CD pods), you should find a record with a key like this:

{DatabaseName}-EQSTAMP-{ComputerName}-{InstanceName}

The value assigned to this record should correlate to the last event in the EventQueue table that was processed on relevant pod (i.e. InstanceName on ComputerName).

Note: the stamp shown in the properties table is base 10, whereas the value shown in the event queue is base 16. So you need to use an online converter to compare.

In your situation

If all your pods have the same instance name, then only one of pods will likely consume the event. It will then update the stamp, which means when other pods check to see if there are any events to consume it will find none need processing.

Assign unique InstanceName in Kubernetes

In order to assign a unique InstanceName value in each CD pod in your kubernetes cluster, you need to make use of environment variables. In the specification file for your CD pod, you should have something like this set:

    env:
    - name: Sitecore_InstanceName
      valueFrom:
        fieldRef:
          fieldPath: metadata.name

This should result in values similar to myapp-0, myapp-1 and so on. With this in place, it should override file based configuation.

Further information

How is the Event Queue Procerssed

Sitecore Environment Variables