I know this post is overdue, but I’m happy to say that in the time since MIX has elapsed, my wife and I have sold our condo and moved to a new home. I’ve also transition to a new contract, and I am excited to get my feet wet my new project. Despite […]
Blog Post by: bdewey
Today lets take a look at what BizTalk Host Dashboard provides in BizTalk 360. The below picture shows the screen shot of BizTalk Host Dashboard.
and the Hosts List
The BizTalk Host dashboard shows the following key information related to the BizTalk Host
1. General Properties
At the top of the screen, the general characteristics of the host will be displayed it will include properties like name, type, windows group, 32bit, etc.
Even though its trivial thing, BizTalk host dashboard header will have appropriate icons to represent the host type. Examples: In-process, Isolated, Default host etc..
2. Host Instances Configured for the host
The dashboard also displays the host instances created for this particular host and details about it. Based on the authorization setup for the user it will also allow the users to start/stop/disable/enable host instance straight from this screen.
3. Throttling Settings (read-only)
The dashboard displays the throttling settings for the host. The throttling settings are read-only. Since this is not something you check on a day-to-day basis, the settings are by default hidden inside a collapsible panel to keep the UI clean.
4. Host Container View
This is one of the key functionalities of the dashboard, lets see the basics of host, host instances and server mapping and explain how BizTalk 360 host dashboard help us understand what’s running inside the host by visualizing it dynamically.
Host/Host Instances/Server mapping basics:
A BizTalk Host is a logical container where you deploy items such as adapter handlers, receive locations (including pipelines), and orchestrations. A host instance is the runtime engine where the message processing, receiving, and transmitting occurs. You install a host instance on each BizTalk Server computer that has one or more hosts mapped to that server.
Hosts have the following characteristics:
Host instances have the following characteristics:
The following figure shows the relationship between servers, hosts, and host instances.
In order to find out what’s deployed inside the host you need to look at all the Orchestrations host binding, send and receive ports and their corresponding handler bindings. Normally you’ll require someone with solid BizTalk expertise to understand this relationships. BizTalk 360 addresses this challenge by its internal algorithm to work out the relationships and displays the container view dynamically as shown below.
Example: Host used only for receiving
Example: Host used for receiving, processing and sending
As you can see you it will be a valuable information when you are looking at an environment and figuring out your scalability options and BizTalk deployment best practices.
Twitter: @biztalk360
facebook: http://facebook.com/biztalk360
PS: If in case you don’t know BizTalk 360 is a web based (RIA) application, built using Microsoft SilverLight. The above screens are accessible via browser.
Nandri!
Saravana
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Blog Post by: Patrick Wellink
Today lets take a look at what BizTalk Server dashboard provides in BizTalk 360. The picture below shows the BizTalk Dashboard of BizTalk 360:
It displays 4 key information related to BizTalk Server
1. Server Properties:
Background:
In a typical production BizTalk environment we will have more than 1 server to support high availability and scalability. Whey you experience CPU, memory or IO bottlenecks in the BizTalk server tier, you typically add more servers to the group based on the requirement. You start out with a basic scale out configuration and keep adding more servers until your requirements are met.
Note: SQL servers and Message boxes will also be scaled out in accordance with number of BizTalk servers, but its omitted for this discussion. Above (orange shade) images are taken from BizTalk scalability posters.
One of the best practices setting up the BizTalk environment is to use separate host for receiving, sending, processing and tracking messages. BizTalk host is a logical container to host the BizTalk artifacts (ports, orchestrations), once host is defined you create run time host instances (Windows NT services) in the available servers in the group. One of the other best practice is to use dedicated tracking host, which will be responsible for moving data from message box to tracking and BAM databases.
One of the challenge is to identify how the servers in the BizTalk group are utilized, whether for receive, processing, sending or tracking. In order to get this information you need to work out the relationship between BizTalk artifacts, hosts, host instances, adapters used, send handlers, receive handlers, and tracking property of the host. This is time consuming and you need a real BizTalk expert to work out this relationships.
BizTalk 360 addresses this issue seamlessly by a background algorithm that works out all these relationships and present it in a easy to understand format.
2. Products Installed
This section highlights the version of BizTalk Server and Internet Information server installed. Even though this information looks trivial, its really valuable when you are using HTTP/SOAP/WCF receive adapters to receive messages. In a multi server group with applications using one of these adapters sometime its essential to figure out which server runs IIS. If you have scaled out the environment properly, you might have dedicated only couple of server for receiving messages via IIS.
Also, its important to give attention to the icon in header, the globe symbol will only appear when IIS is installed in the server.
3. Host instances running in the server
The BizTalk server dashboard also highlights the host instances deployed on that particular server. Based on the authorization setup for the user it will also allow the users to start/stop/disable/enable host instance straight from this screen.
4. Last 50 Windows Event Log data
One of the other common scenario when supporting BizTalk production environment is users logging in to the production servers (RDP) to check event log data to diagnose errors. This posses high risk allowing support people to access the production servers frequently. BizTalk 360 addresses this issue by bringing the latest event log information direct to the BizTalk server dashboard.
Check out complete features list at biztalk360.com/tour
Nandri!
Saravana
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Blog Post by: Patrick Wellink
BizTalk 360 was announced for public technology preview yesterday, you can read more about it here http://www.biztalk360.com
Why BizTalk 360:
There is one common problem across all the BizTalk customers. i.e there is no proper support tool for BizTalk. It’s a reality people are more passionate and interested in designing, architecting and developing the software and not enough attention is given to the afterlife of that application once it reaches production. It’s very important to focus on a production application, which represents customers business and credibility. BizTalk 360 is all about managing that application that’s in production. There are some of common problems most of the BizTalk server customers face, BizTalk 360 tries to address them
Introduction:
BizTalk 360 is a web based rich internet application built using Microsoft Silverlight and WCF. Web based application means, you can centrally deploy it and no necessity to install all the BizTalk administration components on individual support persons desktop. Also, it comes with rich authorization module, which allows to give fine grained authorization to support people. No more remote desktop (RDP) access to all production servers, restrict users to only few BizTalk applications, or even provide only read-only access in the environment. The choice is yours.
Let’s see some brief introduction to some of the key modules of BizTalk 360
BizTalk Environment Dashboard:
This is the home screen of the application, as soon as you access an environment, you are presented with the environment dashboard showing various part of the system and their health status.It shows the number of applications, number of hosts, number of message boxes etc. in the environment. The green and red represents their respective health status, red is error, green is healthy. If there are any suspended instances in the environment, a red bar will appear with the count of total suspended instances and the last suspended date time.
BizTalk Application Dashboard:
BizTalk application dashboard provides a single view into a particular BizTalk applications. The artifact headings are colour coded to represent their overall health. If there are suspended instances it will be highlighted on the dashboard. Read here for more info
Diagrammatic representation of Send Port:
A picture is worth more than 1000 words, BizTalk 360 come with diagrammatic representation of send ports (only send ports for V1, road map to include other artifacts like orchestrations, receive ports etc)
Artifact Properties:
BizTalk 360 allows to view the properties of all the BizTalk artifacts like send port, receive port, receive location, map, schema, application, pipeline, etc
Governance/Auditing:
Lack of tooling around "who did what" in the system is the number one challenge. In a production application it’s vital to log this information for various reason. BizTalk 360 handles it seamlessly and provides views out of the box to see this information in your fingertips. Read here for more info
User Access Policy:
If you are running one of your "AAA" rated application on BizTalk server, you want to control the user access in a fine grained way. You don’t want one of your junior analyst supporting the application to have administrator rights on production environment. You want to control things like
BizTalk 360 takes care of all these requirements seamlessly with a full admin panel to control it, and also audit it. Read here for more info
Topology:
BizTalk server is targeted for enterprise customers, so a typical BizTalk environment will have at least 4 servers (2 BizTalk, 2 SQL) in most of the cases to support high availability. It’s vital to know your topology any time without digging through out of sync Visio documents. BizTalk 360 provides a graphical view of your topology dynamically generated from your environment. Read here for more info
Advanced Event Viewer:
One of the other problem application support people face maintaining BizTalk production environment is probing through various event logs across multiple servers in the group to diagnose problems. This is both time consuming and also a security risk allowing support people to have full access to the servers. BizTalk 360 tackles this issue by providing a centralized event viewer functionality. It understand the topology of the environment, pulls all the event log information and presents it in a central place. The query builder is powerful as shown in the above picture. Read here for more info
Business Activity Monitoring portal:
BizTalk 360 also comes with a simple BAM portal, which allows users to get to BAM data from a single UI. Users can search for activities, see permission and activities time window. BizTalk 360 utilizes the security mechanism provided by BizTalk BAM infrastructure, hence this will nicely complement your existing BAM investment.
Host Container View:
BizTalk host is a logical container for various BizTalk artifacts. When it comes to scalability, administrator normally create multiple host and host instances and deploy them in various BizTalk servers. BizTalk 360 provides a Host Dashboard, which allow users to see what’s running inside the host (host instance) at any point in time. From the above picture you can see it list the orchestrations, send port and receive ports that run inside a particular host. Read here for more info
BizTalk Server Characteristics:
In a typical production BizTalk environment you’ll have 2 or more servers performing various activities like sending, receive, processing and tracking based on your requirements. BizTalk 360’s BizTalk Server dashboard provides the characteristics of that server and it clearly shows "how the server is been utilized". Apart from this the server dash board shows various other things like host instances running in the server, event viewer data, whether its web server etc. Read here for more info
This blog post is just an intro to BizTalk 260, please check the feature tour section for further information. You can also download and give it a shot.
Nandri!
Saravana
In essence it says that we are looking for new recruits in the Microsoft (Integration) area. Great opportunities for the right person.
Also see http://www.zystems.se/
Blog Post by: Johan Hedberg