BAM Reduce the Barrier to Entry by Brennan O’Reilly
You’ve taken the plunge by creating and deploying your BizTalk solution. You’ve gone through up’s and down’s of noting requirements, creating a design, a multitude of BizTalk artifacts and have finally rolled the solution out to the world. The business users are happy because the solution works. The operations team is happy because the solution seems care for itself. All in the all the world seems like a better place. Or is it?
Eventually business users and the operations team may want broader visibility into what’s happening with the solution. For example if a business user submits a message to BizTalk, they will want a guarantee that the message has made it to its destination. If the message does not make it as anticipated, the user and operations team may want visibility into the path the message executed. Consider Business Activity Monitoring as providing visibility in your BizTalk solution to many parties. Almost every project can benefit from implementing BAM and with the “out of the box” tools included with BizTalk 2006, not implementing BAM is like buying a car and not using the windshield wipers.
Let’s discuss basic BAM terminology:
- BAM Activity -> Conceptual or logical container for tracking of data. Each BAM Activity translates into a physical SQL table in the BAM database after deploying the Activity. You define the milestones or data items to track within the BAM Activity.
- BAM View -> Window into data items captured within the activity. A BAM view also contains different aggregations based on the tracked activity items. Most basic approach is to create a single view for each activity. A BAM workbook will create a new Excel worksheet for each BAM view.
- BAM Tracking Profile Editor -> The main tool to map physical BizTalk artifacts to deployed BAM Activities. This tool identifies how which artifacts report data to the BAM Activity.
Here are some suggestions to creating a BAM Excel Workbook solution that reports activity from every BizTalk artifact in your solution.
- Create a basic Activity that captures the main steps (milestones) as well as basic data points (business data) of each deployed orchestration and orchestration messages. For example:
- Milestone: Process Begin
- Milestone: Process End Successfully
- Milestone: Process Exception
- Business Data: Transaction ID
- Business Data: Transaction Type
- Create a View that reports on the milestones and business data created above as well as includes the following items:
- End Group milestone which maps to:
- Process End Successfully
- Process Exception
- Duration Item which maps to:
- Process Begin
- End Group Milestone
- While optional, consider creating progress dimension and a count measure to report on how many processes are in a given state. For example to report on how many processes executed successfully versus failed in execution.
- Deploy the BAM Activity and associated Excel Workbook via the bm deploy-all command.
- Map the deployed activity to the deployed BizTalk artifacts.
While minimalist in definition, this deployed BAM activity will provide a view into processes that are operating as well as identify which processes have failed. Additionally you will be able to expose information about the process to the business user without needing to expose or train them on other BizTalk tools such as the “Health and Activity Tracking tool”.
BAM does not have to be mystery to implement and while an extensive framework exists consider approaching it from a minimalist perspective. Additionally while BAM solutions must wait until you’ve built the BizTalk solution consider looking at the BAM design from the beginning of a project versus waiting until the project is complete.
About Brennan O’Reilly:
Brennan O'Reilly is an Enterprise Solutions Architect for EMC's Microsoft Practice in Bellevue, WA. He has authored Microsoft white papers, delivered BizTalk Patterns presentations at events such as Tech-Ed 2005, co-authored the upcoming BizTalk 2006 Recipes book and is founder of the NW Connected Systems User Group based in Bellevue, WA.
BizTalk 2006 Recipes Book Now Available on Amazon.com
The long awaited BizTalk 2006 Recipes book is now available! This is the first book published that covers the new features of BizTalk 2006.
I was fortunate enough to get to work with the authors of this book as a Tech Reviewer. As a reviewer, I was able to test each recipe and provide comments on each of them. The end result from all their hard work is an excellent BizTalk 2006 book. It covers BizTalk from end to end and is a must have for any BizTalk project!
This book takes a different look at learning BizTalk using recipes, that is smaller units of work on exactly how to accomplish many of the common BizTalk tasks.
This book has over 170 problem solution recipes covering Administration, BAM, Rules Engine, as well as core BizTalk Runtime features. |
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Take a New Look at BizTalkGurus.com Forums and Blogs
I recently converted the existing PhpBB based forum to Community Server 2.1. This adds extensive RSS support and an enhanced user interface. Take a look at the new forum today.
I also set up a new BizTalk Community Aggregated Blog. It brings together over 80 BizTalk Community Bloggers all in one place! You can view the blog online or subscribe to the RSS feed. Best yet, you can even search all 80 blogs at once! Please note that all content is property for the original blog owner.
I'm also in the process for moving my blog. If you follow my blog on GeeksWithBlogs.net, please update your RSS feed and links to my new address at: http://www.biztalkgurus.com/blogs/biztalk/.
Easy Serialization and Deserializtion of BizTalk Messages
Greg Forsythe covers how easy it is to convert BizTalk message into .net types and back again in this forum post. With over 410 forum posts, Greg is always posting great help to complex BizTalk issues.
BizTalkGurus.com New Downloads and Samples
Multiple Binding Files in an Application in BizTalk 2006 (9-13-2006)
This sample shows how to use multiple binding files inside an Application to allow for one MSI to be used on multiple target environments. When you add multiple binding files as resources to your application, a drop list will appear when you import your MSI on your target environments.
Splitting Out POP3 Email Attachments in BizTalk 2006 (8-9-2006)
This sample shows how to receive an email via the POP3 Adapter and break off unlimited attachments as separate messages. Each message will be saved to a folder location. Note that this sample is not fully functional; you need to set up the POP3 Receive Location yourself to an existing email address.
Building and Deploying BizTalk 2006 Solutions with MSBuild (8-7-2006)
This sample shows how to use MSBuild (available with Visual Studio 2005) to build, deploy, and undeploy a BizTalk 2006 Solution. This sample does not use an MSI or a binding file and build, binds, and deploys all BizTalk and .Net code using MSBuild Tasks. This sample uses the custom tasks developed by Microsoft UK and available on GotDotNet.
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
The Bottom Line:
My dog (Kendall) has learned to turn on our gas stove in the kitchen. Twice now, she has been able to jump up and turn on the burner full blast! I guess child proof does not mean dog proof!
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