Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!
Every release, we aim at improving the usability of BizTalk360 by adding new features and enhancing existing features as per customer needs. At the moment, we are working on release v9.0.2 of BizTalk360 and we are very excited to blog about a feature which introduces Auditing for BizTalk360 Licensing and User Access Policy activities.
When it comes to cutting edge technology, security is the main key factor we always need to consider. Keeping that in mind we implemented auditing for BizTalk360 activities, in addition to the auditing capability for Alarm, Artifacts Mapping and Secure SQL Query activities, which we already have in the product.
Licensing Auditing
License activation is the first step to be able to use the BizTalk360 application. It is a must to audit the License activities, so we are bringing this feature in our upcoming release v9.0.2. Let us consider the scenario where we have multiple super users and all the super users will have access to manage the BizTalk360 license. So anyone can activate, deactivate or remove the license at any time. If one of the users deactivated the license in one environment and activated the same in another environment, then no other user can use the BizTalk360 application. Without knowing that, other users may try to activate the same key and then they will get an exception saying, “There is already an active license for this order number/license code”. This may lead to lots of confusion. But now, with this license auditing feature, all the licensing activities will be audited. The administrator can easily get to know if any licensing changes are made in an environment.
In License auditing, you will be able to see the activities like License Activation, Deactivation and Removal of licenses, along with the details like Environment name, Product License Type, Environment Type, Order number, License code, License edition and Max BizTalk servers.
User Access Policy Auditing
After the License activation, the next important activity will be creating Super/Custom users and provide access to the BizTalk360 features. This action can be done at BizTalk360 User Access Policy section and it’s very important to audit these activities.
In User Access Policy auditing, BizTalk360 captures the below activities:
Adding Super/Custom users
Modifying the access permission for existing users
Removing users from an environment
Creating, Modifying or Deleting the Application Groups
Creating, Modifying or Deleting the Custom User Profiles
More information about these activities can be seen in the details view.
Manage Users
In the User Access policy => Manage Users section, you can add users as Superuser or Custom user. If you add a user as a Super User, then the user will have access to all environments. Otherwise, if you add the user as a Custom User, then the user will have access only to the provided environments. You can also give module wise access to the custom users.
If there is any need of role change between the users, you can also do that by switching role from Normal user to Superuser or from Superuser to Normal user.
Above all, the activities will be audited under User Access policy Activities in Governance and Audit.
In the Details view, you can see who has done that activity, whether the added user is a Superuser or a Custom user, rules you applied for the user and user template, in which you can see what all the modules are the user will have access to.
You can also see the inner level auditing. For example, in “Secure SQL Queries”, you can give access only to particular queries in which they can do the provided actions, like Adding query, Edit and Execute the query, etc.
To understand the applied changes, you can see all the updated values by comparing with the previous values. For user profile templates, you can see the difference by color codes (Red – removed access, Green – Added access).
Manage Custom Profile Templates
In the User Access Policy => Manage Custom Profile Templates section, you can create user profile templates in which you can provide access to a set of modules. While adding (or modifying) a custom user, you can choose the right template to easily provide the user with the required access.
These activities (Creating, Editing and Deleting User Profile templates) will be captured under User Access Policy Auditing.
Manage Application Groups
In the User Access Policy => Manage Application Groups section, you can create groups which contain a set of BizTalk Applications. While configuring Application rules during user creation, you can select those Application Groups. The user will have access only to the applications which are configured in those Application Groups.
The creation, updating and deletion activities of Application Groups will be captured in User Access Policy auditing.
The same details can also be seen in Live Feed, just by enabling the Live Feed in BizTalk360 settings section
Purging
To avoid running out of disk space, purging needs to be done for older data. In BizTalk360, we are providing a configurable purging policy for the data in Governance/Audit. Administrators/Superusers can set up the purge duration under Settings. Audit data will persist in the BizTalk360 audit table based on the purge policy setup.
Conclusion
As discussed before, if a user accidentally did some changes on license activation/deactivation or User Access Policy configurations, then you can easily track those activities and can revert back to the existing configuration if needed using BizTalk360 Auditing.
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack it’s a Visio package that contains fully resizable Visio shapes (symbols/icons) that will help you to visually represent On-premise, Cloud or Hybrid Integration and Enterprise architectures scenarios (BizTalk Server, API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Event Hub…), solutions diagrams and features or systems that use Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies in Visio 2016/2013:
BizTalk Server
Microsoft Azure
Integration
Integration Service Environments (ISE)
Azure App Service (API Apps, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, and Logic Apps)
Event Hubs, Event Grid, Service Bus, …
API Management
IoT, and Docker
Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, Data Factory, Data Pipelines
and so on
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Flow
PowerApps
Power BI
PowerShell
Infrastructure, IaaS
Office 365
And many more…
… and now non-related Microsoft technologies like:
SAP Stencils
What’s new in this version?
New shapes: new shapes were added to existing modules like:
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!
INTEGRATE (formerly known BizTalk Summit) is the premier, and maybe the biggest integration conference in the world focused on Microsoft Integration and a must go event for anyone who is working in this area. So, if you missed the chance to attend the London event this year, this is your last chance to meet and interact with the Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Integration MVP’s and a huge list of attendees that are in fact experts from the field in these areas.
Since the first BizTalk Summit event till today, I’m a constant presence as a speaker at these events, and I had the enormous pleasure to present last time this event happened in USA (2017), that was, in fact, the first time I deliver a session in an event in the USA… and the way I was received and cherished by the attendees was so special that I could not miss this opportunity to come back again! So, I’m thrilled to say that I will be present once again in the INTEGRATE USA event delivering the second part of the session: BizTalk Server Fast & Loud!
Also, I’m extremely happy to say that for the second time DevScope (my company) will be sponsoring this amazing event!
I receive so many amazing feedbacks about my BizTalk Server Fast & Loud session two years ago, that this year I decided to create this second part, I was a bit nervous in the beginning because I want to keep the good level on the previous session and avoid what usually happens with the sequels in the movies, as a new part is released the quality goes down… and I think I did a good job, at least based on the feedback in London event. Personally, I love this session more than the previous. But at that time, I decide to do this session I did not know, and/or I had not decided that I would be present in the USA this year. So, this is, in fact, a happy coincidence, because the last time the event happened in USA my talk was the first part of this session :), so it makes more sense. But if you were not there you can see the first part of this session here: BizTalk Server Fast & Loud
About my session
Session Name: BizTalk Server Fast & Loud Part II: Optimizing BizTalk
Session Overview: Following the success of one of Sandro’s previous presentations at Integrate, Sandro decided to go deep on this hardcore BizTalk topic: Optimizing your BizTalk Server. This session will allow you to gain a better view on how to optimize BizTalk Server for better performance in all phases: your teams proactivity, your code, your environment, and your goals. Once again, this is a very extensive and complex topic and there is no magic formula you can apply to solve all your problems. This presentation will aim to guide you through some of the most important steps, operations, tasks and best practices that you need to do or be aware of, in order to boost the performance of your BizTalk Server projects and that you can adjust or follow according to your needs.
The event will take place between June 24-26, 2019 at Microsoft Campus, Redmond, WA and you are still on time to register for the conference here.
From time to time we go on a call with our customers because they raised a support ticket, or simply to explain a particular feature of the product. During such sessions, in most cases, the Operations Dashboard is the first screen which will show up after starting BizTalk360.
Unfortunately, quite often we find that dashboard in its out-of-the-box status. In this article, we will explain taking maximum benefits of the Operations Dashboard.
The default dashboard looks similarly like shown below.
Of course, it is up to our customers to leave the BizTalk360 Operations Dashboard to its defaults. However, there is a big opportunity to make the Operations Dashboard much more informative about your BizTalk environment. In this article, we will show some examples on how to improve the Operations Dashboard.
What is the Operations Dashboard?
The Operations Dashboard, the Home Page of BizTalk360, is designed to provide its users with valuable information about their BizTalk environment. The advantage is that each user has its own homepage and can shape it to his/her own requirements. For example, you can think of showing information in the following categories:
• Suspended/Running Instances
• Status of BizTalk artifacts
• EDI Interchanges and Transaction Sets
• ESB Faults, Itineraries and Resubmissions
• Customized information based on REST API’s
• Shortcuts to BizTalk360 features
All the information is shown in, what we call, widgets. For most widgets, you can decide on matters like:
• Location on the dashboard
• Size of the widget
• Refresh interval of the widget
In summary, by choosing the relevant widgets from the available set of widgets, rearranging and resizing them according to your needs, you can create a highly usable and effective dashboard which gives you a good overview of the health of the environment.
You can read more about Widgets and Widget Operations in the Documentation Portal of BizTalk360.
Before I joined Kovai.co, I was a BizTalk consultant and mainly had developer and administrator roles at many different companies. During that time, I frequently helped these customers out by installing and implementing BizTalk360. Obviously, setting up the Operations Dashboard was a part of that kind of assignments.
In many cases, I ended up with a dashboard like the one which is shown below.
Above dashboard is divided into the following 5 different sections:
1 – Shortcuts to BizTalk360 features
As BizTalk360 has grown over the years to a very rich-featured product, it can be hard to find your way through all the features. Because we want to make navigation throughout all the features a bit easier, we have added pinpoints to most of the features. By clicking on such a pinpoint, a shortcut to the feature is added to the Operations Dashboard. This first section contains several such pinpoints.
2 – Status of BizTalk artifacts Part of providing an overview of your BizTalk environment is being aware of the status of your BizTalk artifacts. You can think of your Receive/Send Ports, Orchestrations, Host Instances and depending on your scenario, also the EDI Parties & Agreements. BizTalk360 helps you in providing the status of these artifacts in one glance, after you have added these artifacts from the widget library to the dashboard, resize them and drag them to the position you want them to show up.
3 – Some miscellaneous widgets
This section shows the following 2 widgets:
• Monitoring status – this widget reflects the status of the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service. This Windows NT service is used for amongst others performing the actual monitoring, sending notifications, etc. Because this is such an important component, it makes sense to show its status on the dashboard.
• Link to the documentation portal – to help our customers, we put a lot of effort into the maintenance of the documentation portal. Besides topics like Release Notes for all its releases, you will also find detailed information about all the features of the product. That’s why it is handy to have this portal easily accessible from the dashboard.
4 – BizTalk runtime information
Another important category of information to have at hand is the runtime information about Running and Suspended instances. BizTalk 360 contains widgets for both categories and for aggregations like Service Class, Service Name, Error Code, Host Name, BizTalk Application and few more. These different aggregations enable you to take the aggregation you prefer the most.
Besides the Runtime information, the section also shows the BizTalk Environment Properties, which you will find handy to have at hand.
5 – Alarm information
This last section shows information about the two different kinds of alarms. With BizTalk360, you can setup Alarms, being:
• Alarms – used for threshold and health monitoring. The widget shows information about the number of created alarms, how many are Enabled/Disabled, how many alarms contain mappings to (BizTalk) artifacts and how many still need to be mapped to (BizTalk) artifacts
• Data Monitoring – used for monitoring the processing of messages by BizTalk. This widget shows the number of monitors created for each type of monitor.
The purpose of these widgets is to provide the insight if, for example, alarms have been turned on/off for maintenance or few alarms are just empty containers and still need to be mapped to artifacts.
The described set of widgets is just an example. If you feel like some of those widgets are not helpful for you, it is totally fine to select different widgets from the library.
Custom widgets
From time to time, we see customers experimenting with the so-called Custom Widgets. A Custom Widget consists of HTML and JavaScript. By creating such widgets, you can make calls to REST API’s and show the output of such REST API’s in the widget. This leads to an enormous range of capabilities! We have seen customers making calls to BizTalk360 API’s to show the result of for example SQL queries, or the status of the BizTalk related SQL Server jobs, but we have also seen customers are embedding Power BI views directly in their BizTalk360 Operations Dashboard!
In the Documentation Portal, we have written an article about creating a Custom Widget for showing the results of a SQL query. We have seen that this is something quite useful. Read this article in the Documentation portal, or this blog post, if you want to know more about how this is done.
Global and private dashboards
The Operations Dashboard is the home page for the BizTalk360 user. However, having one dashboard might not be enough for your requirements. You might need to show a lot of different information on a dashboard, and having that information on a single dashboard would make it messy and you’ll lose the overview.
To help you out, you can create additional dashboards in BizTalk360. Additionally created dashboards show up in the Operations menu, under Dashboards.
In addition, you can choose whether a dashboard is Global or Private.
A Global dashboard can be accessed by anyone who has access to BizTalk360. A Private dashboard can only be accessed by the BizTalk360 user who created the private dashboard.
User Policy limited access to information
The data which becomes shown in the dashboards depends on the permissions which are provided to the user. This means that:
there are no limitations for a Super User
a Normal User will only have access to the information according to his/her User Access Policy. A few examples:
if the user has no permissions to EDI, the EDI related widgets will not show up nor be accessible for that user
information about BizTalk Applications (Ports, Orchestrations and Service instances) for which the user has no permissions, will not show up in the dashboards
Conclusion
With this article, we intend to encourage you to think about your Operations Dashboard. It is not hard to customize your dashboard and you will benefit from a nicely customized dashboard immediately!
If you want to discuss your Operations Dashboard or need some help to properly set it up, feel free to contact us at support@biztalk360.com.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!
This is a collection of 5 different image formats of the new UnofficialBizTalk Server 2020 logo (or logotype), three of them are available in vector format (ai, eps and pdf) that will allow you to use and resize without losing quality:
BizTalkServer2020-linhas.ai
BizTalkServer2020-linhas.eps
BizTalkServer2020-linhas.pdf
BizTalkServer2020-linhas-01.jpg
BizTalkServer2020-linhas-01.png
You can be used to customize a banner for your blog, an article, making flyers, stickers, brochure or rollups for BizTalk Server or integration events/conferences and much more – your imagination is the limit!
Again, this is not the official logo because the product is not yet available, so I don’t know what Microsoft will do. This is made by taking into consideration the previous logos of the product. Remember that in BizTalk Server 2016 Microsoft decided to drop the fancy Server icon from the logo and the version identification, it is a simple generic logo with just Text with the intention to be consistent in this and further versions of BizTalk Server. But people still prefer to use the “old” format just because it is easier to visual specify the version of BizTalk Server… for that reason only, there you have this new logo with 2020!
Thanks to Cristovão Silva (UX/UI DESIGNER at DevScope) for helping me creating these resources.
BizTalk Server 2020 logo in vector format (3.1 MB) Microsoft | TechNet Gallery
After once again many speculations and controversy caused in INTEGRATE 2018 London event about the vNext release of BizTalk Server, promptly denied two weeks after the event with a formal announcement from the Microsoft Integration team, finally some excellent news for the Microsoft Integration community and all the clients out there that still consider MSFT Integration Stack the best in the market. Paul Larson announced in his session at INTEGRATE 2019 London event the release of BizTalk Server 2020 to be scheduled for the end of this year.
Of course, one of the main reasons for this new version is about Platform Alignment. This new version will support:
SQL Server 2019 and SQL Server 2017 (still not sure if SQL Server 2016 will be also supported)
Windows Server 2019 and I’m almost sure that Windows Server 2016 will still be supported
What can we expect… more in BizTalk Server 2020 release?
One of the greatest things for customers that are running BizTalk Server Standard Edition is that BizTalk Server 2020 already comes built-in with all BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack Features, that means that all these features are now part of the product in all versions:
A new set of cloud adapters:
Logic Apps adapter: that will allow you to easily connect and easily extend part of your integration with Azure Logic Apps, making it easier to implement robust hybrid solutions;
Service Bus adapter: that will allow you to send and receive messages with Azure Service Bus;
Event Hubs adapter: that will allow you to send and receive messages with Azure Event Hubs;
Office 365 Mail adapter: that will allow you to send and receive messages using Office 365 e-mail;
Office 365 Schedule adapter: that will allow you to set and update appointments using Office 365 schedules;
Office 365 Contact adapter: that will allow you to define people and groups using Office 365 contacts;
Blob Storage adapter: that will allow you to read and write binary files in Azure Blob Storage;
API Management connectivity: the availability to publish an Orchestration endpoint directly on Azure API Management;
Deployments with VSTS: Application Life cycle Management feature will help you to perform automatic deployments in an improved and easy way using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS);
Security features:
Transport Layer Security 1.2: TLS 1.2 is now fully supported in BizTalk Server. This includes all the adapters and accelerators. You can also disable SSL, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 in BizTalk Server;
SQL Server Encrypted Data: You will be able to read and write to SQL Server always encrypted columns using BizTalk Server WCF-SQL adapter. The ColumnEncryptionSetting binding property is used to enable or disable the functionality to get decrypted/encrypted column values from an Always Encrypted database;
BizTalk Database Backup to Blob Storage: the availability to backup BizTalk Server databases, using the default backup job directly to an Azure Blob Storage;
Advanced Scheduling: the availability to set up recurrence on BizTalk Server receive locations with greater precision using times zones, months, weeks, and days;
Application Insights: the availability to send BizTalk Server tracking data to Application Insights for extensible analytics, to understand performance and usage of BizTalk Server;
Power BI operational data feed in BizTalk Server: Analyze and report BizTalk Server tracking data template, for use with Power Bi visualizations and dashboards;
Tracking data to Azure: the availability to send BizTalk tracking data to Azure Application Insights or Event Hubs
BizTalk Server Rest Management API’s: you will able to manage BizTalk Server environments using standard RESTful Web Services APIs. You will have now available REST-based API for pretty much for any management activities like retrieving Applications, Hosts, Send Ports, Receive Ports, Receive Locations, Orchestrations, Schemas, Maps, EDI specific things like Agreements, Batches, Parties, Policies, and so on.
But you may expect some small improvements like:
Administration (read-only): New set of privileged to access to the BizTalk Server Administration Console by allowing you to restrict unprivileged administrators to viewing existing configurations
Enterprise Single Sign-On 2020
and others not publicly available yet… let’s wait.
Along BizTalk Server 2020, we will also have a new version of Host Integration Server (HIS) with the same platform alignment that BizTalk Server but also with:
With this release, Microsoft continues to deliver a mature, reliable and stable integration server that honors the trust of the thousands of customers who run their mission-critical business processes on BizTalk Server.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
If you want to receive these updates weekly, then don’t forget to Subscribe!
