A modern Service Bus Explorer alternative
New and improved. Now on macOS, too.
For more than a decade, Paolo Salvatori's Service Bus Explorer has been the tool every Azure developer reaches for when something's gone sideways in a queue. It's free, open source, and it works. A lot of us learned what a dead-letter queue even was by staring at its message lists.
viewbus exists because that tool deserves a continuation — one that runs natively on both Windows and macOS, knows about more than one namespace at a time, and plays well with the AI assistants developers reach for every day. Same problem, different decade.
What stays the same
- No telemetry, no accounts. Your data stays on your machine.
- Connection strings still work — paste one in and you're browsing. They live in the OS keychain instead of a config file.
- The verbs you already know: peek, dead-letter, resend, requeue.
What's different
- Sign in with Azure once and viewbus indexes every namespace, queue, topic, and subscription you can see — locally, in SQLite. Navigation stays instant across thousands of resources.
- Multi-tenant aware. If your account spans several Azure tenants, viewbus enumerates them and lets you flip between them from the account dialog. Sidebar tree, search, and MCP results all stay scoped to the active tenant.
- Ctrl+I opens a fuzzy spotlight that searches every queue and topic at once. Works even when the window is closed to tray.
- Native macOS build for Apple Silicon. Same app, same shortcuts.
- Search message bodies across every queue, topic, and dead-letter queue at once — trace a stuck order by its ID without opening each resource by hand. Neither the original nor the Portal can do that.
- Background dead-letter alerts: pick the queues and subscriptions to watch, set thresholds, and viewbus notifies you when a backlog builds — before it becomes an incident.
- An MCP server is built in. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP-aware assistant can list namespaces, search resources, count messages, and peek bodies — over local stdio, no cloud round-trip.