This form of architecture may be referred to as an event-driven SOA where the events drive the design of the architecture, and the numerous services make up the flow of the disparate events that drive the workflow; please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_SOA,. In an event-driven workflow, business users monitor the events.

In this case, the events are messages; one way to monitor the messages in the queues is to examine the queues. If SQL Server queues are being used, then the tables can be examined. If MSMQ is being used, then products such as MSMQCommander (https://github.com/sverrehundeide/MSMQCommander) can be used to examine the messages.

There are many examples to look at MSMQ and SQL Server queues. Another one can be found at http://blog.halan.se/page/Service-Bus-MQ-Manager.aspx that will work like the following:

However, the preferred method is to use the NSB ServicePulse tool found at http://particular.net/servicepulse, which can check the heartbeat of...