We always aim to constantly improve our product based on our customer feedback and the business needs of our customers. Keeping that in our mind, we add some significant features in every single release. In this blog, you can get to know about all the stimulating features we have shipped in our latest v8.9.5 release.
Quick Alarm
Are you new to BizTalk360? Now you can easily setup monitoring, just in a Single click by using a Quick Alarm.
The Quick Alarm feature has been brought into the product to give a unified experience to the user to easily set up monitoring. A Quick alarm is a consolidated alarm which selects a few artefacts from the BizTalk Applications and map them for monitoring, under various categories (Threshold, Data Monitoring, Health Check) .
Quick Alarms can be configured from Monitoring Dashboard and from Manage Alarm section just by providing the alarm name and email id. This configuration also takes care of SMTP setup if you have not yet configured it in your environment. So once a Quick Alarm has been configured, you will be notified through email if any monitoring violation happens.
Send Port Group Operations
One of the powerful features in BizTalk Server is Send Port Groups, which help to route a single message to more than one destination.Send Port Group operations and monitoring is one such important feature we did not yet include in BizTalk360. At a point, we received a feedback from one of our customer “As they were not able to fully start/stop the applications from BizTalk360 when they have Send Port Groups configured ” .Hence, we have taken it for v8.9.5.
Now, you can perform operations such as start/stop/enlist/unenlist the Send Port Groups from BizTalk360. With this new capability it is possible to manage the operation of BizTalk applications (Start & Stop) for all the artifacts of each application in BizTalk360. This implementation makes the life easier for the BizTalk support engineers without context switching between BizTalk admin console and BizTalk360.
One of the main objectives for us from the security perspective is auditing. We have leveraged the governance and audit capability to capture all the activities of Send Port Groups performed by all the users within BizTalk360.
Send Port Group Monitoring
From the latest version, you can completely manage and monitor your Send Port Groups from BizTalk360. Create an alarm, map the Send Port Groups for monitoring by setting up the expected state. If any threshold violation occurs, you will be notified. You can also setup auto-healing for this monitoring; once the Send Port Group goes down, then BizTalk360 will try to auto heal it to the expected state.
Alarm Auto Reset
We allow users to configure number of alerts to be triggered within stipulated duration if any threshold violation happens . When the configured alert reaches it limit ,it cannot be reset unless if the threshold violation resolves or user reset it manually .This is an impacting issue for some customers who monitor several artefacts under same alarm .In this scenario, when artefact 1 goes down, you will get notified with down alerts on periodic interval based on your configuration. Later no further notification will be sent when any other artefact goes down , since the number of alerts has already reached its maximum count .This problem is now resolved with the Alarm auto reset functionality, in which the alert counter will automatically reset after configured time. So, there is no chance of missing alerts when your artefacts are going down.
Auto Correct Reset
Auto healing is one of the dominant features available in BizTalk360. When you configured auto correct for your artefacts, the system will try to always maintain the expected state which you have set for those artefacts. When the artefacts state changes then the system tries to bring it back to the expected state. Here, the maximum retry is based on user configuration. So, what happens when it reaches the max retry count? It will not try to auto correct the state. To overcome this problem, we have introduced a new capability called Auto Reset. From this version on, the retry count will get automatically reset as per the user configuration (e.g.: 10 mins).
So when you configured Auto-healing for your artefacts, it is guaranteed the system will always try to maintain the expected state without any downtime with this new capability.
Delete ESB Fault Message
With the ESB Fault Delete functionality, you can delete the fault messages which are not important for resubmission.
Let us consider this scenario, a send port that you are using in your application fails unexpectedly, therefore both the service instance and the message become suspended and the fault information is written into the ESB exception database. Once the exception is corrected and resubmitted for further go, there may be two scenarios which will come into picture:
Messages which are submitted successfully are residing in the ESB Exception database and are of no further use.
Messages are rerouted to the ESB Exception database due to recurrent failure. In this specific case, the original message also available in the ESB portal.
In BizTalk360, we have introduced a new option “Delete” to clear the messages which are not required anymore. Additionally, all the deleted activities are audited in both Governance & Auditing and Live feed section to ensure the security.
Custom User Profile Templates
When we work on cutting edge technology, security is one of the important factors we always need to consider. When a new user is created, you can provide access to the corresponding features based on the roles of the user. Consider a scenario where the customer would need to provide similar permissions to multiple users. It could be very time-consuming to make the changes for every user. BizTalk360 made this process very easy for the users by introducing the capability to create custom profile templates. You can create a custom template with the desired features selected and choose the template while creating the users.
Few Enhancements and Bug Fixes
Besides these new features, we have also brought a number of enhancements and bug fixes.
Filter Operators Improvements
BizTalk360 has the capability to query the data from various databases to show important data such as Service Instance details, Tracked/Message service details, ESB and so on. To filter the data from the corresponding database, BizTalk360 provides rich Query Builder capabilities. From this version on, we have added few additional operators in line with the BizTalk Admin console for easy access to the data in both the Operation and Data Monitoring sections.
Notification Channel Improvements
Associated Alarm
Imagine a user wants to know about the mapping of a specific notification channel out of all the configured alarms in the environment. This was a tedious task in earlier versions of BizTalk360.
To get the quick status of the notification channel association with Alarms, we brought the new option “Associated Alarms” in the Setting side, to view all the mapped alarms in a single view.
DLL Reconfiguration
There was no option to reconfigure the notification channel, if any changes were made in the existing notification channel DLL. You need to go and change all the properties in all the alarms where the specified notification channel is mapped. Now, the reconfiguration process will be seamless from the UI without touching the database.
License Expiry Reminder
To provide an insight about the type of license and date of expiry , License expiry notification will be shown in UI for all the license types (Commercial, Partner & Product Specialist).
Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. Get started with the free 30 days trial.
This post is for the Portuguese Communities (Office365, Integration, and others). It will be held on January 30, 2019, between 18:50 – 20:30 the XLVIII Porto.Data Community meeting at the Science and Technology Park of University of Porto (UPTEC) in Oporto.
For me it is once again a pleasure to return to this community speaking once again about PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, this time showing real case scenarios on a talk with the following title: “How we use Microsoft Flow and PowerApps: Real cases scenarios”
Abstract
We know that all business problem can be solved with a variety of technologies and different solutions. However, sometimes developing that type of solutions has traditionally been too costly and time-consuming for many of the need’s teams and departments face, especially those projects that are internally for organizations to use or for a short time period. As a result, many of these projects or solutions will be on the shelf or in the imaginary of the collaborators.
They are in Dynamics 365, Office 365, on premises, on the cloud… they are everywhere, and they are fantastic! Developers can do it; IT can do it… you can do it!
Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, sometimes together sometimes isolated are here to help you, and in this session, we will show you real live scenarios on how we use these two technologies in our customers and internally at DevScope.
XLVIII Porto.Data Agenda
18:50 – Welcome reception
19:00 – “How we use Microsoft Flow and PowerApps: Real cases scenarios” – Sandro Pereira – Azure MVP – DevScope
20:00 – Coffee break / Q.A / Community News
20:15 – Closure
20:20 – Prize draw
20:30 – Dinner (optional)
This is a free event with very limited seats that you will not want to miss, register now!
We are waiting for you.
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira
What started to be a Microsoft Integration Stencil Packs is now almost a full Microsoft stack stencil package that includes Microsoft Integration, Azure, BAPI, Office365, devices, products, competing technologies or partners and much more Stencils Pack it’s a Visio package.
This package 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
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 Flow
PowerApps
Power BI
PowerShell
Infrastructure, IaaS
Office 365
And many more
This new small update includes the new Office365 icons that were recently announced by Microsoft. It includes an additional of 19 new shapes and some reorganization.
The Microsoft Integration Stencils Pack v3.1.1 is composed of 22 files:
Or from: Microsoft Integration and Azure Stencils Pack for Visio 2016/2013 v3.1.1 (18,6 MB) Microsoft | TechNet Gallery
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform?
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!
Feedback
Hope this would be helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with your feedback and questions.
Last year I didn’t have the opportunity to deliver 16 sessions across the world like 2017 because I had to slow down my trips, or I didn’t participate as I would or did in the past in some communities and I don’t regret a single second. If I have to describe 2018 in a single word I have to choose: family.
I don’t have any difficulty in selecting the best moments, my baby boy born and I move my family to a bigger house because we now have 3 kids, two beautiful girls, like there mother and of course a mini-me.
So, as you may imagine, I struggle to have free time, but when you love what you do, instead of finding excuses you will always find a way to do it. So in the end, I was able to:
Publish 70 new posts in my blog; I wrote more blog post that in 2017, And I just now realize that! And the countries that most visited my blog still are the United States, followed by India, the United Kingdom, and Canada in a total of 194 countries
IntegrationMonday |online |The birth of a new SSO Application Configuration Tool
XXXX Porto.Data meeting, March 27 | Porto | Automatization Platform with Dynamics 365 | Dynamics365, Microsoft Flow and PowerApps
CSI about Microsoft Flow and PowerApps
Integrate 2018 | London | BizTalk Server Notes from the Road
MVPDays Microsoft Flow Conference 2018 | online | How we use Microsoft Flow and PowerApps: Real cases scenarios
And migrate all and improve, at least almost all, my community projects to GitHub:
And this is just a small set of my contributions because I still publish several small scripts and sample codes on TechNet Gallery and Code Gallery and help in other ways the community.
My favorite’s posts
The top posts that I enjoyed writing or add more fun to do it last year was:
Because of the fact normally people look at me and think that I’m a BizTalk guy but I really do more than BizTalk Server, but I only like to write about real stuff that I use daily and indeed I had a lot of fun writing these blog post and real-life cases.
And of course, to close this list:
Thanks for following me, for reading my blog and I promise that I will continue to share my knowledge during 2019.
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc. He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community. View all posts by Sandro Pereira
A few more days to go for the release of our new version, BizTalk360 v8.9.5. Release by release, we aim at improving the user experience by adding new features and enhancing the existing features as per the suggestions and feedback received from our customers. The feedback can be posted in our User Voice portal http://feedback.biztalk360.com. There, customers can vote for the posted suggestions if they feel that the ideas also fit into their business requirements. These suggestions will be taken up for development based on the priority of voting.
There have been quite a few features and enhancements added in this release. Let’s look at one of the features which got the attention of many customers and that we thought it would ease the users in their business operations while using BizTalk360. So come on, lets jump in!
User Access Policies
After the installation of BizTalk360 and activation of the license, the next thing the user would do is to create the users, groups and provide access to the BizTalk360 features in the User Access Policy section. This is available only for providing access to the features in BizTalk360 and not for BizTalk level access. The importance of this feature can be known from the article User Access Policy.
In our previous version, BizTalk360 v8.9, this feature was enhanced to configure different rules for providing access to the existing as well as newly created BizTalk applications for the users. Get to know about the different rules here “User Access Policy – The New Look for Application Access”.
As part of this enhancement, we have introduced the concept of the Application groups for grouping the applications of similar category and provide users the access to the Application groups. So, any new application created, when added to such an Application Group will be automatically given access to the users.
Now there is an additional feature of managing custom User Access templates, which is described in the later part of this article.
As part of this enhancement, the user management, application groups and the custom templates must be managed in different sections. This has been done to avoid confusion to the users. Hence, the existing look of the User Access Policy section has been modified as below.
Manage Application groups
The application groups can now be managed in a separate section. Here, the application groups can be created, modified or deleted. Now it would be easy for customers to create application groups and manage them from a single section rather than moving between the screens.
Manage Users
This section remains the same as in previous versions, where the users and NT groups can be created, modified or deleted. Modification has been done in the Add permissions section for the normal users to include the custom profile templates newly created.
The Profile Templates
Keeping in mind the level of security needed for accessing the features and performing the operations with the BizTalk environment, we have the fine-grained authorization within BizTalk360. When a new user is created, the permissions to the BizTalk360 features can be selected from the list of features under each section and saved to the user profile. When the new user logs in to BizTalk360, he can only use the features which are added to his profile.
In the earlier versions, the features were selected from the list available or from the predefined templates available. These predefined templates come as part of the installation. There are three predefined templates available:
View only modules – Choosing this template will provide read-only access to few features in BizTalk360. This will be helpful for the Level 1 support team
Limited operation access – This provides access for the users to operate on Host Instance, applications and service instances
Full access to all modules – As the name implies, the user will have access to all the features when this template is chosen
As per the feedback received from the customer, we have added the new capability to create custom templates and select them for providing access to the users.
How do the custom templates help?
Consider a scenario, where the customer would need to provide similar permissions to multiple users. This can be done by creating a group and applying the profile to the group account. But what if we need to make some minor changes to some of the users. It would be very difficult to make changes for some users within the group.
With the help of a custom profile template, this can be made in a single click. You can create a custom template with the desired features selected and choose the template while creating the users. Won’t this be an easy and quick way of configuring permissions to the users? Yes, of course!
The creation of custom templates is also done very quickly. The custom template can be created by providing a name to the template and selecting the features to be added to the template. With this feature, for each custom template, you can select permissions and store them as a custom template.
This would be similar to the Add permissions section in the user creation, but the only difference being the selected features can be saved to a template and used later in creating different users. The predefined templates would be suffixed with System Predefined in the name.
With the custom profile templates, the user creation is made much easier. The customer need not scroll through the entire list of features while creating users.
Conclusion
We always monitor the feedback portal and take up the suggestions and feedback. Now we would like to request you, our customers, to please take the time to fill this questionnaire to help us prioritize the next upcoming feature tasks, to let us know what are your main pain points and help us to further improve the product.
Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. Get started with the free 30 days trial. Happy monitoring with BizTalk360!
Author: Praveena Jayanarayanan
I am working as Senior Support Engineer at BizTalk360. I always believe in team work leading to success because “We all cannot do everything or solve every issue. ‘It’s impossible’. However, if we each simply do our part, make our own contribution, regardless of how small we may think it is…. together it adds up and great things get accomplished.” View all posts by Praveena Jayanarayanan
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform?
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!
Feedback
Hope this would be helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with your feedback and questions.
Are you new to BizTalk360 ? Now you can easily setup monitoring just in a Single click! The Monitoring capabilities are a key feature of BizTalk360. Setting up monitoring is a very easy and quick task. With a two-step process, you create an alarm and map the artefact(s) to be monitored. We wanted to make this much easier for our customers. So keeping that in mind we bring the new feature ‘Quick Alarm’ in our upcoming release v8.9.5 .
What is a Quick alarm?
A Quick Alarm is a consolidated alarm which selects a number of artefacts from the BizTalk Applications, which are in the Start/Stop/Partially Started state, and map them for monitoring. Under various categories (Threshold, Data Monitoring, Health Check) a Quick alarm maps the following resources for threshold monitoring:
Receive Locations
Send Ports
Orchestrations
Host Instances
Host Throttling
SQL Jobs
BizTalk Servers
For Data Monitoring (with basic filter configuration) the Quick Alarm is configured for:
Process Monitoring
Message Box
Tracking
BAM
EDI
ESB
Is a Quick Alarm different from normal alarms?
No, a Quick alarm is not all different from normal BizTalk360 alarms. Quick Alarms have been brought into the product to give an unified experience to the user to easily set up monitoring. A Quick alarm supports all the normal BizTalk360 alarm capabilities, like:
• Reset notification count • Copy the alarm configurations • Change status – Enable/Disable Alarm • Once a Quick Alarm is configured it can be edited or deleted any time
Quick Alarm can be configured in 2 ways
From the Dashboard When no alarms have been configured in your environment, you can configure a Quick alarm either from the general Monitoring Dashboard or from the Data Monitoring Dashboard.
Quick Alarm Configuration
2) From the Manage Alarms section You can also create a Quick Alarm from the Manage alarms section by selecting the ‘Quick Alarm’ button, even though you have already configured some alarms.
Configure Quick Alarm From Manage Alarm Section
Note: There is no restriction on the number of Quick Alarms you create. You can create any number of Quick Alarms in your environment. Though how many times you create a Quick Alarm with the same set of applications, it will always configure the same artefacts for monitoring.
Once a Quick Alarm has been configured you will be notified through email.
• If there is any threshold violation on the mapped artefacts • Data monitoring alerts on every 15 mins • Health check alert on 12 PM everyday
These configurations can be changed later at any point in time.
If in case BAM, EDI,ESB is not configured in the environment, the Quick Alarm configuration skips these and configure the rest of the resources for monitoring.
Who can create a Quick Alarm
A Quick alarm can be configured only by super users. This facility is restricted for normal and NT Group Users.
SMTP Configuration
If SMTP is not configured in the Settings side, the Quick Alarm configuration will automatically update the default BizTalk360 SMTP account.
Note: This default settings can be modified at anytime. The Quick Alarm configuration will not modify/update anything if you have already configured your SMTP account. It uses your configured SMTP details for sending alerts.
Conclusion
A Quick alarm is an easy and fast way to set up monitoring of the most important artifacts of your BizTalk artifacts. Are you tired of constantly having to monitor your BizTalk environment in a manual fashion? Give BizTalk360 a try and take benefits of Quick Alarms. A trial version of BizTalk360 can be requested here.
This blog post is more of a reminder for myself as much as anything. I had a need to mark some service accounts in Azure AD so that their passwords dont expire.
The aim was that we had a few service accounts used in a couple of places and we wanted to have a controlled process to change their passwords.
To do this we did the following:
Create a group to store associate all of the service accounts for our project for easy management
Add all of the service accounts to that group
Run a script which will check every member of the group and to change the password policy so the password doesnt expire
I had a look online and couldnt really find a resource showing how to do this which didnt use the old Office 365 mso powershell functionality so I thought id share this for anyone else who might find it useful.
Below is the script I used and usually run each time we might need a new service account where we want more granular control of the changing of passwords for service accounts.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform?
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!
Feedback
Hope this would be helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me with your feedback and questions.
