What’s new in BAM in BizTalk Server 2006 by Jon Flanders
In my opinion, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) was a feature in BizTalk Server 2004 that was tremendously under-utilized by most BizTalk deployments. BAM is an infrastructure for collecting real-time business intelligence data about your processes and providing mechanisms for viewing that data, also in real-time or also providing a historical view (including rollups). At its base level, BAM is an API which allows you to collect data into something called an Activity. You can think of an Activity as being a row in a database. The API allows you to push data into an Activity, not necessarily all at once, thus allowing you to have one Activity spam multiple physical processes, which is often the case in today’s service based applications. (Please see the BizTalk Server 2006 documentation for more information about BAM and how to use it). BAM provides easy application of these Activities to a BizTalk Application through an interception layer that is applied to your application using a visual tool (the Tracking Profile Editor). This means that none of the BAM calls are hard-coded into your code, but are executed based on the tracking data exposed by BizTalk being dynamically picked up by the BAM interception layer.
In BizTalk Server 2006 they’ve made BAM even more attractive by adding a number of new and exciting features. Probably the most exciting feature is the BAM Portal. The BAM Portal is an ASP.NET 2.0 Portal (it does not require Windows Sharepoint Services) which has three main pieces of functionality. First the Port provides Activity search capabilities. A powerful editor is built into the Portal providing easy querying into Activity data. If you were using BAM to provide progress information for an application that processed orders – you could query for a particular order to find out where in the pipeline the order was. Or you could query for all the orders that were in a particular stage which might be able to help you find bottlenecks in your business process. These queries can be saved, and the re-used again and again. Another thing the query page can do is to help you setup the second main functionality in BAM – alerts.
You can take a query from the query page and use it to create an alert. BAM alerts are built on top of SQL Notification Services, which will allow you (or others) to be notified when an event matching that query occurs. For example you could query for orders that are taking longer than 2 days to process, and then setup an alert for that query. This would notify you via email when there are orders that are taking that long, which would give you the information to go and find out why these orders are taking longer than your business rules allow. Alerts could also be used for things like the daily sales total, or orders that are above a certain amount in value. These alerts can be used for both IT related and business related data - a very powerful tool that BAM provides out of the box.
The third piece of functionality provided by the Portal is views. A BAM view is an aggregate view on top of one or more BAM Activities. These views are created in Excel (one of the main tools for use with BAM) as Pivot Tables. The Pivot Table definition is then exported into the BAM infrastructure – and is used as the basis for both real-time and historical aggregations (real-time aggregations in BAM are stored in SQL Server tables, historical aggregations are stored in cubes in SQL Analysis Services).
Once deployed the view is used by the BAM Portal to provide a web based look at this data. It does this by using the Office Web Components inside of an ASP.NET Page in the Portal.
This means that unlike in 2004 (when a copy of the Excel spreadsheet had to be shared in order to provide a view into the aggregate data) – now in 2006 anyone with access to the Portal can now see the views from a web browser, which means that changes to the Activities and views are easy to deploy.
The other BAM improvements are the ability to define a view not just from Excel – but also from the Orchestration Designer for Business Analysts (ODBA) which is a tool built into Visio which allows a business analyst to see the flow of your orchestrations. In Excel, BAM is more fully integrated as an Excel Add-in, which solves some of the problems that sometimes happened in 2004.
Also, the interception infrastructure has been extended into the BizTalk messaging engine, where in 2004 it was limited to just Orchestrations. All in all BAM is even more powerful and easier to use in 2006, if you are building a BizTalk Server 2006 application you definitely should be looking at BAM as a way to instrument your business processes.
About
Jon Flanders:
Jon Flanders is a trainer, consultant and BizTalk Server MVP, focusing on BizTalk Server and Windows Workflow Foundation. He is current teaching both subjects for Quicklearn – http://www.quicklearn.com/. Learn more about what Jon is doing on his website at http://www.MasteringBizTalk.com.
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BizTalk Server 2006 is now available on MSDN Downloads
It's official, BizTalk Server 2006 is now RTM. That's Released to Manufacturing.
If you have a MSDN Subscription, it is now available for download through the MSDN site. In addition, the Enterprise Adapters and several of the Accelerators are also available.
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What's New in BizTalk Server 2006 Virtual Lab
Microsoft has released a new 30 minute, hands-on virtual lab covering the new features of BizTalk Server 2006. It is called What's New in BizTalk Server 2006.
- The lab covers:
- Quick Setup Review
- Import a BizTalk 2006 Application
- Examine the Business Activity Monitor
- Deploy a Package as an msi file
It's available now and well worth a look at!
BizTalkGurus.com New Downloads
Biztalk Rules Engine Deployment Helper Tool
This tool can help with importing and exporting policies and vocabularies in BizTalk Server 2004. This tool supports the use of a configuration file to limit what is imported and exported.
Submitting Xml Documents to BizTalk 2006 via SOAP
This sample shows how to modify a BizTalk Web Service to submit Xml Documents into BizTalk and route them using direct binding. The key to routing the message submitted by the Web Service is to make sure the Receive Port uses the Xml Disassembler pipeline.
Comments or Suggestions?
I welcome comments, questions, and suggestions. After all, this newsletter is about delivering content you want to hear about! Feel free to contact me through the forum or via e-mail.
Until next time...
Stephen W. Thomas -
BizTalkGurus.com
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