My day-to-day job focuses on enterprise integration between systems in the cloud and/or on-premises. Currently, it involves integration with D365 Finance and Operations (or Finance and Supply Change Management). One aspect of the integrations is monitoring. When a business has one or more Azure Integration Service running in production, the operation aspect comes into play. Especially integrations that support crucial business processes. The operations team requires the correct procedures, tools, and notifications (alerts) to run these processes. Procedures and receiving notifications are essential; however, team members need help identifying issues and troubleshooting. Azure provides tools, and so do third-party solutions. This blog post will discuss the value of having third-party monitoring in place, such as Serverless360.
Serverless360
Many of you who read blogs on Serverless360 know what the tool is. Moreover, it is a service hosted as a Software as a Service (SaaS). Therefore, operation teams can require access once a subscription is acquired or through a trial. Subsequently, they can leverage the primary business application, business activity monitoring, and documenter feature within the service. We will briefly discuss each feature and its benefits and value in the upcoming paragraphs.
BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
A team can configure, and group integration components with the business applications feature a so-called “Business Application” to monitor. It does not matter where the resources reside – within one or more subscriptions/resource groups.
The overview shown above is the grouping of several resources belonging to an integration solution. In one blink of an eye, a team member of the operations team can see the components’ state and potential issues that need to be addressed. Can the same be done in Azure with available features such as Azure Monitor, including components like Application Insights? Yes, it can be done. However, it takes time to build a dashboard. Furthermore, when operations are divided into multiple tiers, first-tier support professionals might not be familiar with the Azure Portal. In a nutshell, an overview provided by Business Application is not present in Azure out-of-the-box.
As Lex Hegt, Lead Product Consultant at BizTalk360 points out:
Integration solutions can span multiple technologies, resource groups, tags, and even Azure subscriptions. With the Azure portal having the involved components in all those different places, it is hard to keep track of the well-being of those components. Serverless360 helps you utilize the concept of Business Applications. A Business Application is a container to which you can add all the components that belong to the same integration. Once you have added your components to a Business Application, you can set up monitoring for those components, provide access permissions, and administer them.
The Business Application brings another feature that provides an overview of the integration components and dependencies. You might be familiar with the service map feature in Application Insights on a more fine-grained level. The service map in Serverless360 is intended to show the state of each component and dependency on a higher level.
Within a business application, the configuration of monitoring components is straightforward. By selecting the component and choosing the monitoring section, you can set thresholds of performance counters and set the state.
The value of Business Applications is a quick view of the integrations state and the ability to dive into any issue quickly, leading to time-saving by spending far less time identifying the problem (see, for instance, Application Insights health check with Serverless360, and Integrating Log Analytics in Serverless360). With more time on their hand’s operations teams can focus on various other matters during a workday or shift. Furthermore, the ease of use of Business Applications doesn’t require support people in a first-tier support team to have a clear understanding and experience of the Azure portal. Having a clear overview is one thing. However, it also helps operations teams get notifications or finetune metrics based on thresholds and only receive information when it matters. In addition, it’s essential to keep integrations operational when they support critical business processes, as any outage costs a significant amount of money.
BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING
The second feature of Serverless360 is the end-to-end tracking capability called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). The BAM feature organization can instrument their Azure resources that support integrations between systems. Through a custom connector and SDK, you can add tracking to Logic Apps and Azure Functions that are a part of your integration. A unique generated transaction instance-id in the first component will be carried forward to the subsequent stages in more functions and Logic Apps.
The operations team must do some work to leverage the BAM functionality. They need to set up the hosting of the BAM infrastructure, define the business process, instrument the business process and add monitoring (see, for instance, Azure Service Bus Logging with BAM – Walk-through). Once that is done, a clear view of the process and its stages are available.
The benefit of the BAM feature is a concise overview of the configured business processes. Moreover, you get an overview of the complete process and potentially see where things go wrong.
AZURE DOCUMENTER
The final feature Serverless360 offers Azure Documentation Generator, which is intended to generate documentation. Operations teams can generate documentation for the subscription that contains the integrations with the documenter. It is good to have a dedicated subscription for integration solutions to govern better and manage Azure resources.
When operations teams like to generate documentation, they can choose between different templates, storing of the document, and billing range.
The benefit of having documentation of the integrations in a subscription is having a clear overview of the components, details, and costs (consumption). While the Azure portal offers a similar capability, you will have to go to the Cost management and billing to see consumption and cost, Azure Advisor, and other places. Furthermore, there is no feature to generate documentation to help report the Azure resources’ state.The value of the Azure Documenter is the flexibility for generating documentation on a different level of granularity. Furthermore, by frequently running the documenter, you can spot differences like an unexpected increase in cost provide executive reports and information for your knowledge base for integrations.
Conclusion
Features and benefits of Serverless360 have been outlined in this blog post. Of course, there are many more features. Yet, we focused on the most significant one that provides Operations teams the most value. That is a clear overview of the state of integrations in a single-pane-of-glass and the ability to quickly drill down into integration components and spot issues at a fine-grained level. Furthermore, Business Activity Monitoring and Azure Documenter provide end-to-end tracking and generated documentation.
Serverless360 offers an off-the-shelf product for monitoring not directly available in the Azure Portal. As an organization, you can decide whether to buy a product or build a custom solution, or both to fulfill monitoring requirements for integration solutions. Serverless360 can be the solution for organizations looking for a product to meet their needs. It has unique features which are not directly available in Azure or require a substantial investment to achieve. For more details and Serverless360 in action, see the webinar of Michael Stephenson: Support Strategy for Event-Driven Integration Architectures and the latest features blog.
The post The value of having a Third-party Monitoring solution for Azure Integration Services appeared first on Steef-Jan Wiggers Blog.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates 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.
There was a lot of inconsistent and incorrect information about the BizTalk WCF-SAP Adapter installation process and how it works, especially in old versions of the adapter where there was a need to use the classic RFC library to connect to SAP.
Fortunately for us, this process is now simpler and more direct, and this is due specifically to two points:
The Classic RFC Library has been discontinued and is no longer supported (support ended on March 21, 2016). All customers should, if not already using, the “new” SAP .NET Connector (NCo)
Notice that the BizTalk Adapter Pack WCF-SAP adapter has been re-engineered to use SAP .NET Connector instead of the classic SAP RFC SDK. The SAP .NET Connector is available through the ConnectorType property within the WCF-SAP binding. This feature is available from BizTalk Server 2013 and above.
On BizTalk Server 2020, the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack x86 and x64 are now installed with the default installation process. That means that the WCF-SAP adapter is already registered on the server and present on the BizTalk Server Administration Console.
However, that does not mean that everything is ready for you to be able to use this adapter. Unfortunately, you still need to install the SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET available for you to download through the SAP Service Marketplace.
Notice that, like any other adapter, the 64-bit version of the SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET is optional, but if you have a 64-bit BizTalk environment and you want to run it under a 64-bit Host Instance, then you need to also install both versions of the SAP Connector for Microsoft .NET.
BizTalk Server 2020: Step-by-Step WCF-SAP Adapter installation guide
By reading this whitepaper, decision-makers should have more information on the following areas:
Pre-requirements resources that are necessary and how to install them
Register the adapter in BizTalk Server Administration Console
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates 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.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly updates 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.
I’ve been a big fan of this amazing Visual Studio Addin for BizTalk Server since the first days that Nino Crudele decided to create this resource. I still remember the long hours during the night that we were discussing the features and testing this addin using skype. And I have continued to be a fan since BizTalk360 took over this resource.
The purpose of BizTalk NoS Ultimate is to help all BizTalk Developer, and why not, all BizTalk Administrators, in a lot of different situations, by improving the developer experience and reducing the development time in new or existing BizTalk projects, providing better documentation and help to troubleshoot some scenarios/issues you may encounter. But it is mainly a Visual Studio Add-in that enables BizTalk Server developers to be more efficient.
BizTalk development is not pretty easy and requires a lot of patience sometimes, and anyone who has worked with BizTalk long enough will acknowledge this statement. For instance:
It takes immense effort to find out the internal & external dependencies between different artifacts (schemas, maps, orchestrations, and so on).
Testing pipelines within the Visual Studio is not possible.
Some tasks occupy a massive time during development and eventually may delay the project. Unfortunately, no other tool in the market helps in making the BizTalk developer’s lives easier. That is why I love this tool: BizTalk NoS Ultimate.
BizTalk NoS: Your BizTalk Dev Buddy
And now, I also decided to create a whitepaper in a way to be a step-by-step guide to help you get started with the tool and explain all the features available like:
Quick search inside artifacts
Fast DLL register/unregister in GAC
Find critical, internal, or external dependencies
JackHammering, which will compare your VS artifact with the artifact deployed in the BizTalk environment
With this feature, you can also extract the artifact (Orchestration, map, Schema, and so on) from the BizTalk environment and put it in the VS solution
Test your pipeline in VS simply
And many more functionalities that will be useful in our day-by-day work and a time saver in a lot of situations.
BizTalk NoS Ultimate is available for the following BizTalk Server versions:
