A whole raft of whitepapers for BizTalk have been released over the last several weeks
– see here and here.
I completed a
whitepaper a short while back (though just released) on getting the most
out of the BizTalk
2004 Management Pack and Microsoft Operations
Manager 2005. The paper serves as a good reference for the management pack,
but I hope it also serves another useful purpose. Specifically, the “operational
hand-off” phase of the software development life cycle often gets short
shrift – and it can cost organizations a lot of money, downtime, and late nights.
So, much of the paper discusses the importance of having a development team accurately
communicate the “instrumentation surface area” of their completed efforts to an operations
team.
What do I mean by “instrumentation surface area”? To start, we can consider the
sum of all diagnostic logging, event logging, WMI events, performance counters (custom
or built-in), and all other mechanisms your application uses to communicate
its current operational & health state. Moreover, we need to capture “interpretations”
of this information stream that are specific to the application. (Not just “this
send port isn’t working…” but “We are currently not talking to our primary
shipping provider…”) Finally, we need to capture suggested responses
and remediation – also specific to the application.
“Communicated to the operations team”…how exactly? With a Word doc?
Well, in particular, I talk about how to do this for a BizTalk-focused solution using
a custom MOM Management Pack that “derives” from the Microsoft-supplied BizTalk 2004
Management Pack. Done right, this will provide the highest fidelity knowledge
transfer from development to operations.
See what you think – the paper is titled “Advanced
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Scenarios.”
(What a mouthful…)
Comment on this post (if you like) with your thoughts on the paper or experience in
this area…