Event-Driven Integration – Using Azure Event Grid and Logic Apps Together

Are you tired of watching your integration costs spiral while system performance crawls? Traditional polling-based integrations drain resources, create delays, and break under pressure. Your “always-on” infrastructure burns through budget while batch jobs deliver yesterday’s data to today’s decisions.

Every polling request costs money. Every missed event costs opportunity. Meanwhile, your tightly coupled systems create a maintenance nightmare that keeps your team firefighting instead of innovating.

Companies implementing event-driven architecture with Azure Event Grid and Logic Apps cut integration costs by 60-80% while achieving real-time responsiveness. These systems process millions of events per second, react instantly to business changes, and scale automatically without the overhead of constant polling.

What if your systems could respond to customer orders in milliseconds instead of minutes? Event-driven integration makes this possible. When a customer places an order, your inventory system updates immediately. When a supplier confirms delivery, your ERP triggers the next workflow step automatically.

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Why Event-Driven Architecture Beats Traditional Polling for Enterprise Integration

How much does your current integration infrastructure cost per month? If you’re running traditional polling-based systems, you’re likely paying for compute resources that sit idle 90% of the time, only to miss critical events when they actually happen.

Polling creates impossible trade-offs. Poll too frequently, and you waste resources on empty requests. Poll too slowly, and you miss time-sensitive business events. Either choice hurts your bottom line and frustrates users waiting for system updates.

1. Legacy integration methods fail under modern business demands. Your ERP system polls for new orders every 5 minutes, but customers expect order confirmations within seconds. Your inventory system checks for stock updates hourly, while your website promises real-time availability. These delays create customer friction and lost sales.
2. Maintenance overhead compounds the problem. Each polling integration requires monitoring, error handling, and regular updates. When systems change, you must update every polling endpoint. Event-driven systems eliminate this maintenance burden – publish once, and multiple subscribers receive updates automatically.
3. Business agility suffers most. Adding new integration points requires weeks of development with traditional polling. Event-driven architecture lets you add new subscribers in hours, not weeks. When business requirements change, your integration fabric adapts quickly instead of requiring architectural overhauls.

Azure Event Grid and Logic Apps Integration Pattern

How do you build integration that reacts instantly without constant monitoring? Azure Event Grid and Azure Logic Apps create a publish-subscribe pattern that eliminates polling entirely. 

Event Grid acts as your intelligent event broker, routing business events to the right systems automatically. Logic Apps provides the workflow orchestration, turning those events into meaningful business actions.

When you configure a Logic Apps workflow with the “When a resource event occurs” trigger, Azure automatically creates a webhook endpoint and handles the complex validation handshake behind the scenes. Your Logic App doesn’t poll for events – Event Grid pushes them directly when they happen.

This architecture pattern solves the core integration challenge: decoupling event sources from event handlers. Your customer registration system publishes “new customer” events without knowing which systems need that information. Event Grid routes those events to CRM updates, welcome email workflows, and account provisioning Logic Apps – all happening simultaneously and automatically.

Core Components – Topics, Subscriptions, and Event Handlers

Think of Event Grid topics as smart mailboxes for your business events. Two types handle different scenarios:

• System topics – capture events from Azure services automatically (Blob Storage uploads, Service Bus messages, Cosmos DB changes)
• Custom topics – handle events from your applications (customer registrations, order placements, inventory updates)

Event subscriptions work like intelligent mail filters. You configure exactly which events go to which handlers based on event type, source, or custom data fields. For example, your order processing Logic App only receives “OrderPlaced” events from your e-commerce system, while your inventory Logic App gets both “OrderPlaced” and “OrderCancelled” events.

Event handlers determine what happens next:

1. Logic Apps – complex business workflows, data validation, multi-API calls
2. Azure Functions – simple, fast processing tasks
3. Service Bus queues – buffer high-volume events
4. Webhook endpoints – send events to external systems

Event Schema and CloudEvents 1.0 Compliance

Every event follows a predictable structure that makes integration reliable. CloudEvents 1.0 compliance means your events work seamlessly across different cloud providers and on-premises systems. This standardization prevents vendor lock-in and simplifies hybrid integrations.

Required fields provide essential event context:

• specversion – CloudEvents version (1.0)
• type – Event type (e.g., “com.company.order.placed”)
• source – Event origin (e.g., “/orders/system”)
• id – Unique event identifier
• time – When the event occurred

The data section contains your business information. Here’s a customer order event that triggers your fulfillment workflow:

Your Logic Apps trigger uses this standardized format to extract order details, validate inventory, and start fulfillment processes. The consistent schema means your integration code works reliably across different event sources.

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Step-by-Step Implementation – From Storage Event to Business Logic

Ready to see event-driven integration in action? Let’s walk through a common enterprise scenario: your supplier registration portal uploads new vendor documents to Azure Blob Storage, triggering an automated workflow that validates files and transmits them to your ERP system via SFTP.

This implementation eliminates the polling nightmare. Instead of checking for new files every few minutes, your Logic App responds within seconds when suppliers upload documents. The entire process – from file upload to ERP transmission – happens automatically without human intervention.

What this solves for your business:

• Supplier onboarding delays – documents process immediately instead of waiting for batch jobs
• Manual file handling – eliminates the need for staff to monitor shared folders
• Integration costs – removes expensive polling infrastructure that runs 24/7

This pattern works for any file-based integration scenario – invoice processing, customer data imports, or compliance document management. The same architecture scales from dozens to millions of files without changing your core logic.

Configuring Event Grid System Topics for Azure Services

System topics capture events from Azure services automatically – no custom code required. When suppliers upload files to your Storage Account, Azure immediately publishes events that trigger your business workflows.

The setup process takes minutes:

1. Create event subscription – Azure handles the system topic creation automatically
2. Configure filtering – only process the file types and folders you care about
3. Set authentication – use managed identity to eliminate key management headaches

Smart filtering saves money and reduces noise. Configure your subscription to only trigger on:

• PDF invoices in the “/invoices/” folder
• Excel files in the “/purchase-orders/” container
• Files larger than 1KB (ignore empty uploads)

Business benefit: Your team stops wasting time processing irrelevant files. Only legitimate business documents trigger workflows, reducing false alerts and processing costs.

Building Logic App Workflows with Event Grid Triggers

The Logic Apps designer makes complex business workflows visual and maintainable. Your team can see exactly what happens when each file type arrives, making troubleshooting and updates straightforward.

Your workflow handles the complete business process:

1. File validation – check format, size, and naming conventions
2. Content extraction – pull key data for downstream systems
3. ERP transmission – upload validated files via SFTP connector
4. Notification – alert relevant teams of successful processing

Error handling protects your business operations. When files fail validation or SFTP connections drop, your Logic App:

• Retries automatically – handles temporary network issues
• Routes to dead letter storage – preserves failed files for manual review
• Sends alerts – notifies teams when manual intervention is needed

The result? Your supplier onboarding process runs 24/7 without human monitoring. Files process within minutes instead of hours, and your team gets comprehensive audit trails for compliance reporting.

Production-Ready Patterns – Security, Monitoring, and Error Handling

How do you move from proof-of-concept to production-ready integration? Enterprise environments demand security, compliance, and reliability that go beyond basic functionality. Your event-driven architecture needs enterprise-grade patterns that protect sensitive data and maintain audit trails.

Security starts with managed identity authentication. Skip access keys entirely – managed identities eliminate credential management headaches while providing automatic key rotation. Private endpoints keep your events within your virtual network, preventing data exposure through public internet routing.

Dead letter handling prevents lost business events. When Logic Apps are unavailable or events fail processing, Event Grid stores failed events in dead letter storage for up to 7 days. This guarantees no critical business events disappear during system maintenance or unexpected outages.

Azure Monitor integration provides the observability your operations team needs:

• Event delivery success rates and failure patterns
• Logic App execution metrics and performance trends
• Custom alerts when error thresholds are exceeded
• End-to-end tracing across your integration workflows

Getting Started – Your First Event-Driven Integration Project

Which integration should you tackle first? Choose a use case with clear business impact and manageable complexity. File processing workflows make excellent starting points – they’re easy to understand, demonstrate clear value, and don’t require complex business logic.

Your 30-day proof of concept roadmap:

1. Week 1 – Identify your highest-cost polling integration
2. Week 2 – Set up Event Grid system topic and basic Logic App
3. Week 3 – Add error handling and monitoring
4. Week 4 – Measure results and plan expansion

Common integration patterns that deliver quick wins.

• Document processing – invoices, purchase orders, compliance files
• Customer data sync – CRM updates, account provisioning, welcome workflows
• Inventory updates – stock level changes, reorder triggers, supplier notifications

Success metrics to track: Compare your old polling costs against Event Grid pricing, measure response time improvements, and count eliminated manual processes. Most teams see 60-80% cost reduction in their first implementation.

Ready to transform your integrations? Multishoring’s Microsoft Azure integration specialists help enterprises implement event-driven architectures that scale. Contact us for a comprehensive assessment of your integration challenges and a customized implementation roadmap.