INTEGRATE 2018 – Recap of Day 3

INTEGRATE 2018 – Recap of Day 3

Missed the Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2018? Here’s the recap of Day 1 events.

Missed the Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2018? Here’s the recap of Day 2 events.

0815 — Once again, it was an early start but a good number of attendees were ready to listen to Richard Seroter’s session.

Architecting Highly available cloud integrations

Richard Sereter started his talk about building a highly available cloud integrations. He clearly conveyed the message that if there is any problem with the solution with multiple cloud services, it is not the responsibility of the services itself but a responsibility of solution architecture. He suggested to follow the practices such as chaos testing in which one randomly turn off few services and see how the solution behaves.  

Core patterns

Richard started off with some of the core patterns for a highly available solution.

Handling Transient failures — It is quite common that services will have temporary hiccups such as network issues, database issues etc. Our solution need to be designed to handle such scenarios.

Load balancing — scale out Via more instances. Redundancy applies to compute, messaging , event streaming, data and networking, and auto scale.

Replicate your Data  — Both transactional and metadata. Consider read and write. Cross regional replication and Disaster recovery

Throttle some of your users — one user’s load can impact all other integration tenants. Reject or return low quality results, and do it in a transparent way.

Introduce load leveling

Secure with least privilege, encryption, and anti-DDOS

  • access should be as restrictive as possible
  • turn on encryption with every possible ways

Configure for availability

What Azure storage service Provides

  • Get file , disk , blob storage 
  • Four replication options 
  • Encryption at rest 

What we have to do

  • Set replication option
  • Create strategy for secondary storage
  • Consider server or client side encryption

What SQL Table Provides

  • Highly available storage
  • Ability to scale up or out
  • Easily create read replicas
  • Built in backup and restore
  • Includes threat detection

What we have to do

  • Create replicas
  • Decide when to scale horizontally or vertically
  • Restore database from back up
  • Turn on threat detection

What Azure Cosmos DB Provides

  • 99.999% availablity for reads
  • Automatically partitions data and replicates it
  • Supports for multiple consistency levels
  • Automatic and manual failover

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

  • Define partition key , through put, replication policies
  • Configure regions for read , write
  • Choose consistancy for DB
  • Decide to trigger a manual failover

What Azure service bus Provides

  • Resilience within a region
  • Initiates throttling to prevent overload
  • Automatic partitioning
  • Offers geo-disaster recovery

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

  • Select message retention time
  • Choose to use partitioning
  • Configure geo-disaster recovery

What Azure EVENT HUBS Provides

  • Handles massive ingest load
  • Auto-inflate adds throughput units to meet need
  • Supports geo-disaster recovery 

What Azure logic apps Provides

  • In region HA is built in
  • Impose limits on timeout , message size
  • Supports synchronizing B2B resources to another region

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

  • Configure B2B resource synchronization
  • Configure integration to highly available endpoints
  • Duplicate logic app in other regions

What Azure FUNCTIONs Provides

  • Scale underlying resources with consumption plan
  • Scales VM’s automatically
  • Basic uptime SLA at this time

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

  • Choose plan type
  • Set scaling policies while using app service plan
  • Replicate functions to other regions

What VPN GATEWAY Provides

  • Deploys active-standby instances by default
  • Run as a managed service and your never access underlying virtual machines

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

  • Resize as needed
  • Configure redundant on prem VPNdevices
  • Create active-active VPNgateway configuration

To sum it all

Richard finished his talk with few points —

  • Only integrate with highly available endpoints
  • Clearly understand what services failover together
  • Regularly perform chaos testing

0900 — DevOps empowered by Microsoft Flow

During the second session of the day Michael Stephenson explained how Microsoft flow can be used to simplify tasks that can be tedious in execution and bring very little business value e.g. User Onboarding.

The presentation was based on a big multi-business multi-geo CRM Implementation where multiple parties were involved to create a new B2B User. The process consisted of sending a CSV file through PowerShell to create the user in Azure AD and then in Dynamics CRM.

The problem was cross team friction:

  1. Support user does not have enough skills to execute this process and on top of that this kind of scripts require elevated permissions
  2. Admin – does not have enough time to perform this task due to basic daily admin tasks and does not want the support user to accidently delete the system.

Michael then explained how Microsoft flow can be used to create a black box on top of the entire on boarding process and allow the support user to easily execute it without any permissions to the system.

Then Michael together with Steef-Jan, demonstrated the Microsoft flow in action within Minecraft. It looks like the audience really liked the other demo he did from few years back and everyone wanted more.

Next, he showed a diagram on how easily this process can be extended to eliminate the support user from the execution and fully automate it, by extracting relevant information from the request email of the end user.

Lastly, Michael emphasised the importance of automating repetitive tasks within the organisation to improve efficiency and reduce the costs of performing tasks that do not bring business value.  

0940 — Using VSTS to deploy to a BizTalk Server, what you need to know

In this session, Johan Hedberg showed us how easy it is to setup the CI and CD for your BizTalk projects using VSTS using the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature pack 1. He showed us how to configure the BizTalk build project and how to create a build definition in VSTS to run the build whenever a developer tries to check in the code.

He stressed the importance of having automated unit tests and how to run it as part of your build pipeline. He also mentioned the advantages of using a custom agent instead of hosted agent. Overall the session was well received by the audience.

1050 — Exposing BizTalk Server to the World

During this session Wagner explained and demonstrated how you can unlock your BizTalk endpoints to the outside world using Azure Services. Wagner emphasised that there are options such as email, queues and file exchange, but his session focused more on the HTTP endpoints.

The options which were demoed during the session included:

  1. Azure Relays
  2. Logic Apps
  3. Azure Function Proxies
  4. Azure API Management

Each of the available options were clearly explained and Wagner provided detailed information on various aspects such as security, message format and ease of implementation.

“Identify your needs” – was the key to the session. Wagner clearly explained that not every option will suite your requirements, as it all depends on what you want to achieve. For example, Logic Apps is a perfect option to extend your workflows, on the other hand, relays are perfect to securely expose on premise services without the need to punch through your firewall.  

1130 — Anatomy of an Enterprise Integration Architecture

In this session, Dan Toomey talked about complexity of the integration process especially when it comes to integration large number applications together. He talked about how are we doing the integration currently and what problems are we trying to solve using integration and where are all the areas in the integration space where we can do it better.

He further went on to explain how we can use Gartner’s pace layers which includes Systems of records, System of differentiation and System of innovation to create a technology characteristics for the integration scenarios.

For this work we need a solid system of record layer which includes things like Security, API’s, service fabric etc. We should limit the customization in this layer. On top that in the differentiation layer we need systems like Logic Apps which are loosely coupled inter-layer communication systems to take care of the integration needs.

On top of the differentiation layer we need to allow room for innovation for examples things like cognitive services, power apps, Microsoft Flow etc.

1210 — Unlock the power of hybrid integration with BizTalk Server and webhooks!

Toon started out his session by showing the difference between polling and using Webhooks. He pointed out that while polling, you are actually hammering an endpoint, which might not (yet) have the data you requested for. In many scenarios it might be that using Webhooks is more efficient, than using polling. Toon gave an overview of both the advantages and the disadvantages of using Webhooks.

Advantages

  • more efficient
  • faster
  • no client side state
  • provides extensibility

Disadvantages

  • not standardized
  • extra responsibilities for both client and server
  • considered as a black box

After giving few examples of solutions which are using Webhook (GitHub, TeamLeader, Azure Monitoring), Toon continued by giving a number of design considerations for Webhooks, which contained that it’s best to give your Webhooks a clear and descriptive name and use a consistent name convention for easy of use. Also make sure that consumers are able to register and unregister your Webhook via a user interface or via an API.

From a Publisher perspective, you should take care of the following:

  • reliability (asynchronously, not synchronously)
  • security (use HTTPS)
  • validity (check accessibility at registration)

Also Consumers of Webhooks should be aware of reliability and security, but they should also keep high availability, scalability and sequencing of Webhooks.

Toon also showed some demos on how to manage Webhooks with BizTalk and Event Grid and how to synchronize contacts and documents.

1340 — Refining BizTalk implementations

The last session of the event was done by Mattias Logdberg. By taking a user case he explained how you could start with a basic BizTalk scenario in which a web shop was integrated with an ERP by using BizTalk, but based on business needs all kind of Azure technologies were introduced to end up with an innovative solution which enabled for much more possibilities.

He mentioned that Business needs often conflict with IT needs; where the business often needs more and more capabilities, it can be hard for IT departments to keep up with the pace.

Mattias started drawing that basic scenario, which involved that web shop, BizTalk and that ERP system and showed how this scenario could greatly be improved by using Azure technologies like Service Bus topics, API Management, DocumentDb, etc. That monolithic application was turned in a loosely coupled solution with many more capabilities. Bottom line was that by going through this process, Mattias pointed out that unnecessary complexity was removed and the earlier existing complex framework was replaced by a set of micro functions, thereby giving the business more flexibility to further develop their needs.

After the last session, it was time for an open Q&A session with the Microsoft Product Group. The discussion spanned across different areas such as BizTalk Server, Logic Apps, Microsoft Flow and was an engaging one.

With that, it was time to wrap up what was a great 3 days at INTEGRATE 2018.

Check out the pictures captured by our event photographer Tariq Sheikh here —

Day 1 Photos

Day 2 Photos

Day 3 Photos

Thanks to the following people for helping me to collate this blog post—

  • Umamaheswaran Manivannan
  • Lex Hegt
  • Srinivasa Mahendrakar
  • Daniel Szweda
Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

INTEGRATE 2018 – Recap of Day 2

INTEGRATE 2018 – Recap of Day 2

Missed the Day 1 at INTEGRATE 2018? Here’s the recap of Day 1 events.

0830 — An early start on Day 2. The session started with consideration of using Logic Apps for System to System, Application to Application integration. 

Logic Apps finds it applications in multi-billion-dollar transactions that happen through Enterprise Application Integration platform. 

Most of these business cases are in BizTalk Server. Using Logic Apps and other Azure Services can modernise these platforms. 

Microsoft Vision

We do integration at the speed of the business. We want to simplify the process 

Microsoft is building tooling to automatically onboard partners and enable migration from BizTalk Server to Logic Apps. Embracing the change from taking the lead.

They are looking at reducing the DevOps time from Code -> Development -> Production

Microsoft is willing to share what they build to partners and community. Lot of integration patterns being built.

Microsoft is working on strategy to migrate from BizTalk Server to Logic Apps. How they plan to do?

  • Use On-Premise Gateway
  • Publish / Subscribe Model (work-in-progress)

The idea is to use integration workflows, publish to queues and there will be a subscriber reading from Queues to SAP / SFTP depending on the location.

They also mentioned about the categorization of Logic Apps under the following verticals:

  • Policy / Route
  • Processing
  • LoB (Line of Business) Adapters

Suggestion is Have Logic Apps simple and self contained.

As more protocols are being added, they will update the policies. Also help decouple platform from onboarding.

  • APIM Policies make it simple to drive itinerary
  • Policies allow for dynamic routing of messages
  • What properties need to be promoted can be derived from meta data

This means same logic app can be used for different partners and purposes by using routing and metadata

Exception Handling

  • Enumerate over failures in run scope, extract properties relevant to business
  • Forward to another logic app

They are suitable in Warm Path and Hot Path Monitoring.

Future Considerations

Integration Account to be used for

  • BizTalk Server Partner configurations
  • Logic Apps for Partners

Microsoft is ready with Migration strategy for the same

Logic Apps are being built suitable for isolated businesses provide offering to meet strongest SLAs

Amit demonstrated the following

  1. TPM Management tool
  • Help self-service onboarding
  • Accelerate EDI integration
  1. AB Testing tool

Basically, Microsoft is aimed at Simplification and Acceleration of Migration and on boarding process

Finally, they concluded the session with the learning to migrate to Logic Apps

0915 — API Management deep dive

After the first session of day 2 Vladimir Vinogradsky took the stage to talk about API Management which is one of first Azure service that developers gets introduced too.

Vladimir has started of with list of features that Azure API Management offers and how it helps developers to consume, mediate and publish their web API’s. In this he has explained how you can open the azure portal and look at the documentation of your APIs which is powered by Swagger without writing single line of code.

He also went in to detail on authentication and authorization and explained how Azure API management will help you with various authentication mechanisms from simple username password combo to Azure AD authentication etc. He also mentioned how easy it is to use third party providers such as Google, Facebook with Azure API management.

Vladimir then went into detail on what are all the frequent questions from API developers and how Azure API management can solve that. He explained this using some live demos which was well received from the audience.

1000 — Logic Apps Deep Dive

Kevin started with explaining Task Resiliency in Logic Apps

The highlight of the session was the demonstration of Integrated Service Environments (ISE) and its Architecture – but this is in the pre- private preview, means we need to wait for quite sometime.

Private Static IPs for Logic Apps are released with ISE

The deployment model of Logic Apps was also discussed with

Base Unit:

  • 50 M action executions / month
  • 1 standard integration account
  • 1 enterprise connector (includes unlimited connections)
  • VNET connectivity

Each additional processing unit

  • Additional 50M executions / month

Logic Apps now has more than 200 Custom Connectors built. The Component Architecture of Logic Apps goes was also discussed.

1115 — Logic Apps Patterns & Best Practices

Kevin started this session with introducing the following patterns:

Work Flow patterns –

  • Patterns are derived to implement Error Handling at work flows
  • Define Retry policy – turn on/off retries, custom retries at custom and fixed rate as required for business.
  • Run After patterns help in running logic apps after failure or time out. Limit can also be set for eg. You can stop Logic App execution after 30 seconds
  • Patterns for Termination of execution of Logic Apps and associated Run Actions
  • Scopes will have final status of all actions in that scope
  • Implementation of Try-Catch-Finally in Logic Apps
  • Concurrency Control for
  1. Runs
    1. Instances are created concurrently
    2. Singleton trigger executions include level parallelism
    3. Degrees of parallel execution can be defined
  2. Parallel Actions
    1. Explicit Parallelizations
    2. Join with Run After patterns
  3. For Each Loops
  4. Do Until Loops
  • Patterns are discussed for Scheduling Executions. Example workloads can be clean up jobs
  • Logic Apps can execute Run Once jobs. Example workloads can be time based jobs i.e. when you want to fire the action

Logic Apps support Messaging Protocols like:

  • REST/SOAP
  • Workflow Invocation
  • Queues
  • Pub/Sub
  • Event Streams
  • Eventing

These provide workflow invocation and componentization of Logic Apps

Messaging Patterns

Kevin then discussed the patterns for messaging that are categorized as

  • Messaging Communication Patterns
  • Messaging Handling Patterns

Derek Li provided some Best Practices

  • Working with Variables
    • Variables in Logic Apps are global in scope
    • Array is heterogenous
    • Care needs to be taken when using variables in parallel for-each loop
    • Sequential for-each comes handy for having order

Derek Li made an impressive demo on how to efficiently use collections and parallel executions to process messages working with Arrays.

He also made a comparison of executing an array in Logic Apps in different possibilities that provided interesting inference.

He also made a comparison of executing an array in Logic Apps in different possibilities that provided interesting inference.

1200 — Microsoft Integration Roadmap

The last session before the lunch break was presented by Jon Fancey and Matt Farmer. The presentation was short and to the point. The audience got a view of the past and Microsoft plans towards future of integration.

Initially, we got a quick glimpse of all things that have been released as part of pro-integration in the past year. To emphasise that Microsoft is doing hard work in the integration space Jon and Matt announced that Microsoft has been recognised as a leader of enterprise integration in 2018 by Gartner.   

Next came the interesting stuff, what Microsoft has in plans for the Logic Apps?

  1. Smart Designer – as seen in the other demos from Jeff and Derek they want to make the designer more user-friendly. They are looking into getting improved hints, suggestions and recommendations that actually apply to what you are using inside Azure.
  2. Dedicated and connected – for all the companies that care about the security of their integrations, Logic Apps will be available in a vnet.
  3. Obfuscation – another feature that will make the Logic Apps more secure within your organisation. Obfuscation will allow you to specify certain users that will be available to see the output of Logic App run.
  4. On-Prem – Logic Apps are coming to Azure stack.
  5. More: OAuth request trigger, China Cloud, Manage serviced identity, Testability, Manage serviced identity, Key Vault and Custom domain name for Logic Apps

Lastly, Jon and Matt revealed that they want to club every key azure integration such as Logic Apps, Event Grid, Azure Functions under one umbrella called Azure Integration Services.

The aim is to create a one-stop platform that will supply all the tools needed to fulfil your requirements in order to effortlessly bring your integrations to production in minimal time and maximum results. A platform that will allow you to run your integrations wherever you need it and however you need it, serverless or on-prem. We were told that Microsoft will provide guidance and templates across all the regions.

They finalised by acknowledging that there is still a lot to do and that many systems are not yet possible to connect with, but they strive to get everything into the platform including BizTalk, which they still see as part of the integration picture.

1330 — Post lunch, Duncan Barker, Business Development Manager at BizTalk360 thanked all the partners for their continued support. Then Saravana took stage to demonstrate the capabilities  of BizTalk360 and ServiceBus360.

Highlight of this session — ServiceBus360 will be re-branded into Serverless360. For more updates, please read this blog post.

1415 – Serverless Messaging with Microsoft Azure

Steef started with introducing the concept of Severlesss with the evolution from VM -> Containers -> IaaS -> PaaS -> Serverless.

Serverless reduces Time to Market, billed at micro level unit, reduced DevOps.

Messaging in Serverless is like Down, Stay, Come i.e you retrieve message when you want and got good control over message processing

The categorization of Serverless in Azure looks like:

There are various applications for Messaging in Serverless

  • Financial Services
  • Order Processing
  • Logging / Telemetry
  • Connected Devices
  • Notifications / Event Driven Systems

Azure Serverless Components that support messaging are – ServiceBus, EventHub, EventGrid & Storage Queues

Steef provided lot of demo scenario for Messaging applications like

  • Serverless Home Automation (Used Queues & Logic Apps)
  • Connecting to Kafka Endpoint
  • Toll Booth License plate recognition, that included IoT, OCR and Serverless components. He also used functions to process images.
  • Pipes and Filters cloud patterns
  • Microservice Processing
  • Data and Event PipelineHe suggested some messaging considerations:
  • Protocol
  • Format
  • Size
  • Security
  • Frequency
  • Reliability
  • Monitoring
  • Networking

1450 — What’s there & what’s coming in Atomic Scope

After the session on Serverless Messaging with Microsoft Azure, Saravana took the stage to present on Atomic Scope, our brand new product from Kovai Limited. Even though there was an considerable amount of interest in Atomic Scope throughout the day 1 of integration event, most of the participants haven’t got the chance to fully experience the product due to various reasons like time constraints etc.

Saravana started explaining the challenges of the end to end monitoring when it comes to BizTalk and Hybrid integration scenarios and provided a couple example business process belonging to different domains. He also then proceeded to explain list of things that Atomic Scope tries to address like security end to end business visibility etc.

He then pointed out how much amount of effort that Atomic Scope can reduce when compared to the typical custom implementation solution for the end to end monitoring. Then Saravana went little bit deeper and explained how Atomic Scope actually works.

With that Saravana handed over the session to Bart from Integration Team and he showed how solution like BAM will not be sufficient for end to end monitoring and then he proceeded to explain a production ready atomic scope implementation which can add better value than BAM. Bart showed step by step process of how you can configure the business process and how tracking has happened once he dropped an EDI message to the APIM and On premise.

Bart’s presentation on Atomic Scope was very well received so much so that the AtomicScope booth was bombarded by participants after the presentation with people showing interest in the product and from people who was just curious to know more about the product.

1600 — BizTalk Server: Lessons from the Road

Sandro being a great lover of biz talk spoke about best practices such as making use of patterns , naming conventions , logging and tracing etc .

1640 — Using BizTalk Server as your Foundation to the Clouds

The last session of the day was done by Stephen M. Thomas, who gave his view on how BizTalk Server can be used as a foundation to using the cloud. Before he began his actual session, he introduced himself and mentioned a few resources he has been working on for learning purposes of Logic Apps. Amongst them are few Pluralsight trainings and hand-outs which can be found at his web site (http://www.stephenwthomas.com/labs).

The session consisted of two parts, being the Why you could use BizTalk Server combined with Logic Apps and Friction Factors which could prevent you from using them.

Why use BizTalk Server and Logic Apps

Stephen admits that Logic Apps don’t fit all scenarios. For example, in case your integrations are 100% on-premise or you have a low latency scenario at had, you could decide to stick with BizTalk Server. However, the following could be the reasons to start using Logic Apps:

  • use connectors which do not exist in BizTalk Server
  • load reduction on the BizTalk servers
  • plan for the future
  • save on hardware/software costs
  • want to become an integration demo

Stephen sketched a scenario in which the need of connector exist which are not available in BizTalk. Think of for example scenarios for:

  • social media monitoring, in which you need Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn connectors
  • cross team communication, in which you need a Skype connector
  • incident management, in case you would need a ServiceNow adapter

Before Stephen showed few demos on batching and debatching with Logic Apps, he told that Logic Apps is quite good in batching, while BizTalk is not that good at it.

Friction factors

In the second part of his session, Stephen mentioned a number of factors which might prevent organisations to start using Logic Apps for your integration scenarios.

These factors included:

  • We already have BizTalk (so we don’t need another integration platform)
  • Our data is too sensitive to move it to the cloud
  • The infrastructure manager says No
  • Large learning curve for Logic Apps
  • Azure changes too frequently
  • CEO/CTO says NO to cloud

All these factors were addressed by Stephen, putting the door open to start using Logic Apps for your integrations, despite the given friction factors.w

With that, we wrapped up day 2 at INTEGRATE 2018 and it was time for the attendees to enjoy the INTEGRATE party over some drinks and music.

Read the Day 3 highlights here.

Thanks to the following people for helping me to collate this blog post—

  • Arunkumar Kumaresan
  • Umamaheswaran Manivannan
  • Lex Hegt
  • Srinivasa Mahendrakar
  • Daniel Szweda
  • Rochelle Saldanha
Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

INTEGRATE 2018 – Recap of Day 1

INTEGRATE 2018 – Recap of Day 1

June 4, 2018 — The day for INTEGRATE 2018.

0430 — It all started early for the BizTalk360 team. Train ride, walk to the underground station, a tube ride and finally the team reached 155 Bishopsgate, etc.Venues — the event venue.

0610 — Activities sprung off in a flash to get the venue set up for the big day — pulling up banners, setting up the registration desks, and more.. But what happens when 15 people get together to do these, job done in less than an hour.

0715 — Attendees start to come in to the venue and the numbers started to increase as the clock passed 8 AM. Everything started to pick up pace as we were quite strict to maintain the event on time.

0830 — We clocked over 350+ attendees who had been given their badges and the welcome kit.

0845 — Time for Saravana Kumar, Founder/CTO of BizTalk360 to get the event going with his welcome speech. Saravana extended his thanks to all the attendees (420+), speakers, sponsors and his team for making #INTEGRATE2018 a grand success.

0855 — Saravana introduced Jon Fancey to deliver the keynote speech on “The Microsoft Integration Platform”.

0900 — Jon Fancey started his talk with the words “I wanna talk about change“. His talk was focused on history, change, inevitable disruptions in the technology and Microsoft’s approach to work with partners and ISVs to keep up and innovate.

0920 — Jon Fancey presented a case study about Confused.com and introduced Mathew Fortunka, Head of development for car buying at Confused.com. Some of the very interesting insights from the talk of Mathew Fortunka were — Confused.com’s pricing flow is powered by Azure Service Bus and includes a consumption based model. He explained how Confused.com delivers the best price to customers.

0935 — Jon Fancey sets up the context for #INTEGRATE2018 with the fictional “Contoso Retail” example (very similar to the Contoso Fitness example they showed during INTEGRATE 2017). He showed how the traditional Contoso example can change with the Integration concepts, and how Microsoft is using IPaaS offerings in their supply chain solutions. The Contoso Retail is divided into four pieces —

  • Inventory check and back order,
  • Order processing and send to supplier,
  • Register delivery and alerting the customer,
  • Pick up and charge the credit card

Key updates from this fictional example were —

  • VNET integration for Azure Logic Apps
  • Private preview of bi-directional SAP trigger for Azure Logic Apps
  • Demo using a Logic Apps trigger based on a SAP webhook trigger with the webhook registered in the gateway
  • Private hosting of Azure Logic Apps using Integration Service Environments (ISE)

1005 — Just one hour  into #INTEGRATE2018 and already few key announcements from the Microsoft Pro Integration team. This got the audience definitely interested and to look forward for more in the day / over the next few days. Jon Fancey wrapped up his talk with the recap of the key announcements during the talk and a quote from Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.

1015 — Second session of the day by Kevin Lam and Derek Li on “Introduction to Logic Apps“. Kevin started off with the question of “How many in this room have known/worked on Logic Apps?”. 50-60% of the audience raised their hand and this shows how popular Logic Apps is in the Integration space. Then, Kevin Lam explained about the basics of Azure Logic Apps for people who were new to the concept. Logic Apps has over 200+ connectors. Kevin showed the triggers that are available with Logic Apps.

1027 — Derek Li showed how easy it is to move from “Hello World” to Integration Hero in just 5 minutes with an interesting demo.  The power of having Azure and using Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence to the integration process really propels you to become an Integration hero.

Post the demo, Derek continued his talk and showed how you can get the same experience as in the Logic App designer in Visual Studio (for developers). Kevin also showcased a weather forecast demo in just a few clicks.

The second demo scenario was even an interesting one with a little complexity added to it — receiving an invoice, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the image and Azure Function to process the text in the image, and send an email if the amount in the invoice accounted to more than $10.

New Logic App features —

  • Running Logic Apps in China Cloud
  • Smart(er) designer – with AI – better predictive management of connector operations make it even faster
  • Dedicated and connected – on the ISE
  • Testability
  • On-premise (Azure Stack)
  • Managed Service Identity (MSI) – LA can have its own identity and access your system
  • OAuth request trigger
  • Output property obfuscation
  • Key Vault Support

1045 – Networking break time over some coffee

1115 — Jeff Hollan started his talk by saying “INTEGRATE is one of his favourite conference to attend and he loves coming here every year”. Jeff kicked off with a one liner explanation of “What is Azure Functions?”

Then Jeff went deeper into the Azure Functions concepts such as Trigger, Bindings. Jeff showed a nice demo of how you can create an Azure Function using Visual Studio.

Jeff wrapped up his session by giving best practice tips for Azure Functions and the ways in which you can run Azure Functions. Jeff also spoke about Durable Functions and the limitations/tips to use Durable functions. Jeff gave a nice comparison of when you should use Durable and Logic Apps.

1200 — Paul Larsen and Valerie Robb took the stage to talk about “Hybrid integration with Legacy Systems”. They started off with whats coming in BizTalk Server 2016 and the most important update was the announcement of BizTalk Server 2016 Cumulative Update (CU) 5. They also showed the traditional BizTalk Server life cycle diagram that showed that just a month is left ahead for support to end for BizTalk Server 2013 and BizTalk Server 2013 R2.

Paul also pointed about the BizTalk Server Migration Tool, which will make migration from these versions to BizTalk Server 2016 easier.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3

Paul announced the availability of BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3 by the end of June 2018. This Feature Pack will contain, amongst others, the following features:

Compliance:

  • Accessibility – compliance to US government accessibility standard
  • Privacy – compliance with GDPR and FIPS privacy standard
  • Support of SQL Server 2016 SP2

Adapters:

  • Office 365 Outlook Email
  • Office 365 Outlook Calendar
  • Office 365 Outlook Contacts
  • Web Authentication

Administration:

  • Advanced Scheduling

The good thing of SQL Server 2016 SP2 support is, that when you have an Always On setup with Availability Group, you can have multiple BizTalk databases in the same SQL Instance, thereby cutting down license and operation costs.

Besides FP3, the BizTalk team is also working on BizTalk Server CU 5, which is expected for coming July. Few months later, there will also be a CU5, which contains Feature Pack 3.

CU 5 will contain the following:

  • compliance with US Accessibility
  • US FIPS
  • EU GDPR
  • SQL Server 2016 SP 2 (multiple databases per Availability Group
  • TLS 1.2

1245 — Lunch time

1345 — Post lunch, it was time for Miao Jiang from the Microsoft API Management team to talk about “Azure API Management Overview“.

During this session, Miao started with telling about the importance of API`s which started in the periphery but are now in the core of Enterprise IT. Nowadays, API’s can be considered the default way to do it.

Miao explained both the Publish side and the Consumption side of API’s and told about the steps to take with API Management, being:

  1. Consume – use the Developer portal
  2. Mediate – that’s done in the Gateway
  3. Publish – use the Azure portal

Next, he spoke about encapsulating common API functions like access control, protection, transformation and caching via API Policies. After also telling about Policy Expressions, he updated the audience on the recent features and announcements.

Recent features and announcements

Here’s the overview:

  • General Availability of 2 Chinese regions
  • General Availability of 6 US Governmental regions
  • Integration with Azure App Insights
  • Support of Entity Tags in the Admin and Dev portal
  • Support of Versions and Revisions
  • Integration with KeyVault

Miao ended his session with an extended demo, during which he showed, amongst others, how to use Policies to limit the number of requests, how non-breaking compatibility Revisions and breaking compatibility Versions work and also how to mock API’s, enabling Developers and Admins working in parallel on the same API.

1430 – Next up was Clemens Vasters to talk on “Eventing, Serverless and the Extensible Enterprise“. Clemens set the scene by sketching few scenarios. The first scenario was around a photographer who was uploading photos to Service Bus, which triggered an Azure function to automatically resize photos to a particular size. The photos could next by ingested, via an Azure Function, to for example Lightroom, Photoshop or Newsroom app.

The second scenario was about sensor driven management, which can be used for, for example Building management. Buildings could contain sensors for, for example:

  • Occupance (motion sensors)
  • Fire/Smoke
  • Gaz/Bio hazard
  • Climate (temperature/humidity)

With that information available, it will become easy to ask all kind of questions, which can be necessary in case of, for example, an emergency.

The scenarios were just used to point out the incredible amount of possibilities with the current feature set. Clemens pointed out few of the characteristics of services, like they are autonomous and should not hold state.

Clemens concluded that the modern notion of a service is not about code artifact counts or sizes or technology choices; it is about ownership.

Continuing, Clemens told about Eventing and Messaging and about their characteristics and gave some examples on both.

In preview: Event Hubs for the Kafka Eco system

Clemens announced that  Event Hubs for Kafka Eco system is in preview. Features are:

– Supports for Apacha Kafka 1.0, enabling the complete Kafka Eco system to be used in Event Hubs

– Works with existing Kafka applications

– Native implementation of the Apache Kafka protocol

– Fully managed – don’t worry about VMs, storage and tuning

– Rock solid availability and reliability

1530 — After tea break, Dan Rosanova did a session on The Reactive Cloud: Azure Event Grid. He firstly explained the conceptual architecture of Event Hubs, with the flow from Event producers to Event Hub to Event consumers. In a simple demo, Dan showed how events could be generated, pushed to Event Hub and being received in a console application.

Dan pointed out that messaging services, like web hooks or queues, can both be publishers and subscribers to Event Grid. Dan also showed Stream Analytics, Time Series Insights and Java-based Open Source Eco system of Kafka.

1615 – Second last session of the day by Jon Fancey and Divya Swarnkar on “Enterprise Integration using Logic Apps“. Jon explained how the VETER pipeline can be used for enterprise messaging. He continued with telling about a number of characteristics of Message handling in Logic Apps. These characteristics contain:

  • flexibility in content types: JSON, XML
  • mapping: JSON-based and XML-based
  • data operations: compose, CSV/HTML tables
  • flat-file processing
  • message validation
  • EDI support
  • batching support

Jon continued with telling about Disaster Recovery with B2B scenarios. He told amongst others about the ability to have Primary and Secondary Integration Accounts, which can be deployed in different regions. If necessary, you can have multiple Secondary Integration Accounts. All these Secondary Integration Accounts can be replicated from the Primary one by using Logic Apps, in case changes occur in the Primary Integration Account.

After discussing the tracking capabilities for Integration Accounts, Logic Apps, EDI, custom tracking and OMS, Jon explained what’s new to the Enterprise adapters. He mentioned the adapters for SAP, SFTP, SOAP, EDIFACT and also mentioned the B2B connector improvements like AS2 large message support and EDI overrides.

The SAP ECC connector was shown in a demo by Divya. She mentioned the pre-requirements of the adapter and in the demo she showed how to receive a message from that SAP adapter in Logic Apps and simply write the contents of that message to a file location.

The session was wrapped by mentioning what’s new in Mapping, Monitoring and Tracking and what we can expect for the SAP connector and other enterprise adapters.

1700 — Kent’s session started with positioning Microsoft Flow, after which he explained how the product fits in the Business Application Platform. This platform consists of PowerApps (including Microsoft Flow) and Power BI.

Microsoft plans to unify these technologies to one powerful highly-productive application platform.

Momentarily, 1.2 million users, coming from over 213.000 companies, are using the platform on a monthly base.

Kent compared Microsoft Flow with MS Access, where MS Access has less to no visibility to the IT department, where (luckily) this is not the case with Microsoft Flow. Because of the better federation with Microsoft Flow, the risk of proliferation with Microsoft Flow is way less, than with Microsoft Access.

Next, Kent showed 4 demos to the audience, indicating the versatility of Microsoft Flow.

Kent concluded the session with the road map for the second and third quarter of the year. This exists of:

  • Improving the user experience
  • Office 365 integration
  • Compliance (GDPR, US Gov cloud deployments)
  • Sandbox environments for IT Pro’s, Admin, Developer

With that, it was a wrap on the session of Day 1 and time for some networking and drinks.

Stay tuned for the Day 2 blog updates.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

15 best features we released in 2017 — BizTalk360 Product Update

15 best features we released in 2017 — BizTalk360 Product Update

In 2017, we released 4 major releases and 3 patch releases of BizTalk360 with various new capabilities, usability improvements and bug fixes. We wanted to summarize the 15 best features we released in 2017 in this blog

1. EDI Capabilities

We enhanced the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities of BizTalk360 with new features such as —

  • EDI Reporting Manager
  • EDI Reporting Dashboard
  • EDI Functional Acknowledgement Status

EDI Reporting Manager

With the EDI reporting manager capability, you can turn on/off reporting for each agreement in a single click. This becomes a very tedious process when performed using the BizTalk Administration Console (BAC), especially when there are multiple EDI parties and agreements. Users can also perform bulk enable/disable operations on the NRR configuration. Administrators have the option of adding the Host Partner information that is required to configure the host party for NRR configurations.

BizTalk360 EDI Reporting Manager

EDI Reporting Dashboard

We added a rich out-of-the-box EDI dashboard that will aggregate the different EDI transactions to help business users to visualize the EDI data in a better way. The different widgets available in the EDI Reporting Dashboard are EDI Interchange Aggregation widgets, EDI Transaction Set aggregation widgets, AS2 messaging aggregation reports.

We also added few new aggregations (as widgets) that are not available in the BizTalk Administration Console such as Interchange Count by Agreement Name (Top 10), Interchange count by Partner Name (Top 10), Transaction count by ACK Status (Filtered by partner id), AS2 messaging aggregation reports.

BizTalk360 EDI Reporting Dashboard

EDI Functional Acknowledgement Status

In any common B2B scenario, when a message is sent from the source to destination, an ACK will be sent back to the source with the status of the message (say, a technical acknowledgment TA1 or 997 functional ACK). Say, a message is sent from source to destination and the TA1 ACK is successfully received, but the 997 functional ACK is not received. With BizTalk Administration Console, it is not easy to identify the reason why the 997 functional ACK was not received by the sender. BizTalk360 brings in the capability to allow administrators to easily view the status of functional ACK within the UI and set up data monitoring alerts to get notified of negative functional ACKs.

BizTalk360 EDI functional ACK - Query Builder

BizTalk360 EDI functional ACK - Query Result

BizTalk360 EDI functional ACK - Data Monitoring

2. ESB Dashboard

We added a new ESB Dashboard that will allow users to aggregate ESB reports into a single graphical dashboard. There are total 13 widgets that will help users understand their ESB integrations and to better analyse the data to improve performance. The widgets are categorized into 3 groups — Fault code widgets (based on application, service or error type), Fault code over time widgets, Itinerary Widgets.

BizTalk360 ESB Dashboard

3. Notification Channels (Webhook, Microsoft Teams)

We added two new notification channels — Webhook and Microsoft Teams in addition to the existing notification channels such as Email, HP Operations Manager, Slack, ServiceNow. The new webhook notification channel allows you to send structured alert notifications (JSON format) to any REST endpoints whenever there is a monitoring violation.

BizTalk360 Webhook Notification Channel

Additionally, users can now connect a Microsoft Teams channel to their respective BizTalk360 alarms with the proper Webhook URL and receive alert notifications directly to their Teams channel.

BizTalk360 Microsoft Teams Notification Channel

4. Azure Logic Apps (Operations, Data Monitoring)

We brought in the capability into BizTalk360 to be able to manage and monitor the Azure Logic Apps. Therefore, if you are using only the Logic Apps offering from Azure, you need not switch to Azure Portal to manage your Logic App. You can perform all operations on the Logic App such as Enable, Disable, Run Trigger, and Delete. The Trigger history and Run history details are available in both graphical and grid view.

BizTalk360 Logic Apps Operations capabilities

In addition to Logic App Operational capabilities, users can configure Data monitoring to monitor and trigger alerts based on historical events.

BizTalk360 Logic Apps Data Monitoring capabilities

5. IBM MQ Monitoring

In addition to MSMQ and Azure Service Bus Queue monitoring capabilities, we added the IBM MQ monitoring capability. IBM MQ monitoring supports both MQSC and MQS based configurations; you can monitor for the following 4 parameters – queue depth, backout queue depth, queue usage percentage and backout queue percentage.

BizTalk360 IBM MQ Monitoring

6. Folder Monitoring, FTP/FTPS/SFTP Monitoring

With BizTalk360, we wanted to make monitoring of BizTalk resources very seamless in order to differentiate BizTalk360 from other general purpose monitoring solutions. We introduced the capability of Folder monitoring where users get to view all the configured receive locations and send ports that make use of the FILE Adapter and configure monitoring on those specific folders.

BizTalk360 Folder Monitoring

Similar to Folder monitoring, BizTalk360 also supports the monitoring of FTP, FTPS and SFTP adapters. The main purpose of configuring monitoring of these adapters is to monitor for data pile up!

BizTalk360 FTP-FTPS-SFTP Monitoring

7. Infrastructure Settings – New Additions

We added new options to the Infrastructure Settings — BizTalk and SQL NT Services and SQL Server Jobs. Users can perform operations like Start, Stop, Restart, Pause and Resume on the BizTalk and SQL NT Services. Similarly, users can manage SQL Server Jobs (start and stop SQL jobs) in BizTalk360.

BizTalk360 Manage SQL Jobs - Infrastructure Settings

BizTalk360 NT Services Operation in BizTalk and SQL Servers - Infrastructure Settings

8. BizTalk Server Licensing Information Widget

We added a new widget on the Home Dashboard screen that will display key information of the BizTalk server such as BizTalk edition, Server type, Processor, Manufacturer, Number of BizTalk Servers, Total number of license needed and estimated pricing.

BizTalk360 BizTalk Server Licensing Widget

For more details about BizTalk Server Licensing, please refer this blog article.

9. BizTalk Health Monitor Integration

BizTalk360 now supports BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM), previously known as Message Box Viewer (MBV). For many years, we had support for Message Box Viewer where we periodically run MBV in configured environments, parse and store the result and display it in the BizTalk360 web console.

BizTalk360 BizTalk Health Monitor Integration

10. BizTalk Server Host Throttling Monitoring & Availability Monitoring

The ability to monitor throttling is not something new in BizTalk360. With Throttling Analyser, you can easily identify when your BizTalk environment is throttling and in what particular state. With the new host throttling capability, you can visualize and get alerted whenever your BizTalk environment is in the throttling state.

BizTalk360 - BizTalk Server Host Throttling Monitoring

In addition to host throttling monitoring, we also added the capability to monitor the availability of your BizTalk server, say, all your BizTalk servers are up and running. If something goes wrong with one of your BizTalk server, you will automatically get notified about this through the notification channel.

BizTalk360 - BizTalk Server Availability Monitoring

11. Email Template

You can now set up different email templates for different alarms — customize the colour of the email body, font, logo, background, footer background etc. You also have the option to create an email template with an in-built XSLT validator with preview options. We have provided an option for you to choose the notification template in a light/dark theme.

BizTalk360 Customize Email Template

BizTalk360 Email Template

12. Azure Integration Account

In an effort to support Hybrid Integration, we have integrated Azure Integration Account within BizTalk360. This allows users to access  Maps, Schemas, Certificates, Parties and Agreements stored in Azure Integration account in configured Azure subscriptions all withing BizTalk360 instead of logging into the Azure portal.

13. BizTalk Reports (Analytics)

We added this new feature “BizTalk Reports” under Analytics that offers capabilities for users to create schedules and generate PDF reports of performance metrics at specific time intervals (eg., daily/weekly/monthly). The PDF will contain the key performance metrics of BizTalk, SQL and IIS servers, messaging performance and so on.

BizTalk360 Reports

14. Event Log Data Monitoring

In addition to the existing data monitoring configurations, users can now monitor the event logs from BizTalk and SQL server in a particular environment. Users can take advantage of the rich querying capabilities of BizTalk360 Data Monitoring to monitor the event sources from different servers in a single place.

BizTalk360 Event log data monitor

15. BAM Related Activities and Documents

We enhanced the existing Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) feature to accommodate the Related Activities and Related Documents functionality similar to BAM portal. We brought in this feature due to the repeated requests from our customers. You can view the detailed information for the request, view the related activities for the request, download the related documents and view the response activity.

BizTalk360 BAM Related Activities

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Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”.

View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – November 2017

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – November 2017

It’s a bit longer this time! Exactly two months after the previous Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update from #MSIgnite, the Logic Apps team were back for their webcast on November 29, 2017. As always, the expectations were high to look into the updates that are coming into the Logic Apps portal. There was no Jeff Hollan in this session, so it was up to Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Derek Li from the team to deliver the updates. So, buckle up! Here we take a look at the updates!!!

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. SOAP!! Finally – The most requested and voted feature in UserVoice is now available in Azure Logic Apps. You can use the SOAP functionality over and above the already existing custom connector functionality.
  2. Azure Functions with Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. You can have the properties exposed from your Azure Function showing up on the card to make the Azure Function look more richer with the information.
  3. HTTP OAuth with Certificates – OAuth2 is now supported for certificates
  4. Liquid Templates – This feature was released about a month ago. Liquid templates are used in Azure Logic Apps as an XSLT for JSON objects. You can create transformations on JSON objects (ex. JSON to JSON mapping and more other formats) without having to introduce a custom Azure Function. In addition, you can use Liquid templates to create a document/email template with replaceable parameters that you can use to create an output according to your requirement. Liquid templates are part of the Integration Account.
  5. Monitoring View – The Logic Apps team have added some cool functionalities in the monitoring view such as –
    1. Expression Tracing – You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
    2. Decode/render XML with syntax coloring
    3. Do-until loop iterations
    4. For-each failure navigation
  6. Bulk resubmit in OMS
  7. Portal workflow settings page – New page where you can find all the workflow level settings in a single page and you make configuration changes from the single page. This avoids you to go to multiple places just to make specific configuration changes.
  8. New URI expressions – trim, uriHost, uriPathAndQuery, uriPort, uriScheme, uriQuery
  9. New Object Expressions – propertySet, property Add, propertyRemove. These expressions help you to manipulate the object throughout the life of the Logic App.
  10. Configurable parallelism for for-each loops and polling triggers – A toggle button to configure the degree of parallelism in a range of 1–50.
  11. Batching – a new trigger has been added to support the size based release. Furthermore, you can configure all the batches (size based, time based and count based) centrally in the Integration Account.

New Connectors

  • Cognitive Services
    • Content Moderator
    • Custom Vision
    • QnA Maker
  • Azure Kusto
  • Azure Container Instances – Manage containers right from Azure Logic Apps (create, group, manage (run workloads) and delete them)
  • Microsoft Kaizala
  • Marketo
  • Outlook – webhook trigger
  • SQL – dynamic schema for stored procedures
  • Blob – create block blob
  • Workday Human Capital Management (HCM)
  • Pitney Bowes Data Validation
  • D&B Optimizer
  • Docparser
  • iAuditor SafetyCulture
  • Enadoc
  • Derdack Signl4
  • Tago
  • Metatask
  • Teradata – write operations

Derek Li showed a cool demo of how the configurable degree of parallelism works for for-each loops. You can watch the demo from 14:28 in the video.
[embedded content]

Logic Apps New Offerings (New Business Model)

The cost of per action calls to Azure Logic Apps has been reduced and clear distinction has been made w.r.t Native calls ($800 per million actions to $25 per million actions)/Standard Connector calls ($800 per million actions to $25 per million actions)/Enterprise Connector calls.

Standard Integration Account                    Basic Integration Account
500 schemas & 500 maps                              50 schemas & 50 maps
500 Partners                                                        2 Partners
500 Agreements                                                 1 Agreement
$1.35/hour                                                            $0.404/hour – 70% < standard

What’s in Progress?

  1. Complex Conditions within the designer – A Visual Studio Query like builder kind of experience so that they can build conditions as they want and build their applications
  2. Configurable lifetime – Currently the lifetime is set to 90 days. In future, this can be customized anywhere between 7 days and 365 days.
  3. Degrees of parallelism for split-on and request triggers
  4. Tracked properties in designer
  5. Snippets – patterns based approach (templates) to insert into a Logic App
  6. Updated Resource Blade
  7. On Premises Data Gateway
    1. Support for Custom Connectors (including SOAP)
    2. High Availability – create a gateway cluster with automatic failover capability
  8. Custom assemblies in Maps
  9. Support for XSLT 3
  10. New liquid actions – text/json
  11. Connectors
    1. SOAP Passthrough
    2. Office365 Excel
    3. Lithium
    4. Kronos
    5. K2
    6. Zoho
    7. Citrix ShareFile
    8. Netezza
    9. PostgreSQL

Watch the recording of the session here
[embedded content]

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. Microsoft Tech Summit 2017-18 (happening Worldwide) – Logic Apps & API Management
  2. Gartner Application Strategies and Solutions Summit 2017 – December 4 — 6, 2017 at Las Vegas, NV

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!
Reach Out Azure Logic Apps Team

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 Released

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 Released

Microsoft earlier today released BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 for Microsoft BizTalk Server. This release comes 7 months after Microsoft announced the Feature Pack 1 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016.

The BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 (FP2) contains all functionalities of Feature Pack 1 and all the fixes in the Cumulative Update 3. This FP2 can be installed on BizTalk Server 2016 Enterprise and Developer Edition. You can download the latest version from here.

What’s available in BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

In BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2, Microsoft is adding the following capabilities –

  • Deploy applications easily into multiple servers using Deployment Groups
  • Backup to Azure Blob Storage account
  • Azure Service Bus adapter now supports the Service Bus Premium capabilities
  • Full support for Transport Layer Security 1.2 authentication and encryption
  • Support for HL7 2.7.1
  • Expose SOAP endpoints with API Management
  • Event Hub Adapter to send and receive messages from Azure Event Hubs
  • Ability to use SQL default instances and SQL named instances with Application Insights

Application Lifecycle Management with VSTS

With BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1, Microsoft introduced the capability where users can perform continuous build and deployment seamlessly. Check out the detailed blog article that covers the ALM Continuous Deployment Support with VSTS via Visual Studio capability in detail.

In BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2, Microsoft has added improvements where users can use deployment groups to deploy BizTalk applications to multiple servers. This comes in addition to using the agent-based deployment.

Backup to Azure Blob Storage account

In BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2, once you have installed and configured BizTalk server, you can configure the Backup BizTalk Server job to backup your BizTalk databases and log files into Azure Blob storage account.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

Event Hub Adapter in BizTalk Server 2016

With BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2, you can send and receive messages between Azure Event Hubs and BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

Azure Service Bus adapter now supports the Service Bus Premium capabilities

You can use the Service Bus adapter to send and receive messages from Service Bus queues, topics and relays. With this adapter, it becomes easy to connect the on-premise BizTalk server to Azure. In BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2, you can send messages to partitioned queues and topics. Additionally, FP2 supports Service Bus Premium capabilities for enterprise scale workloads.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

Expose SOAP endpoints with API Management

With the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 release, you can expose a WCF-BasicHTTP receive location as an endpoint (SOAP based) from the BizTalk Server Admin console. This enhancement comes in addition to the API Management integrations made in Feature Pack 1 where you can expose an endpoint through API Management from BizTalk.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

Ability to use SQL default instances and SQL named instances with Application Insights

In BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1, Microsoft introduced the capability for users to be able to send tracking data to Application Insights. The Feature Pack 2 supports additional capabilities such as support for SQL default instances and SQL named instances. In addition, users can also send tracking data to Azure Event Hubs.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

Within Application Insights, under the Metrics section, select Custom to view the available tracked properties.

BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2Image Source – Microsoft Documentation

Download and Get Started with BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2

The BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 can be installed on BizTalk Server 2016 Enterprise and Developer Edition (retail, CU1, CU2, CU3, FP). You can download the latest version from here.

Summary

It is really exciting to see the Feature Pack updates being released by the Pro Integration team. This really shows their commitment to Microsoft BizTalk Server and their vision to integrate on-premise solutions with the cloud.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – September 2017

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – September 2017

This episode of Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update comes to us directly from #MSIgnite. It is one of those episodes with a special guest and this episode featured Sarah Fender from the Azure Security Center team. The Pro Integration team are at #MSIgnite that’s happening between September 25-29, 2017 at Orlando, FL. I’ll try to give you a very crisp recap of the proceedings during the event and the important announcements from the #MSIgnite event.

Azure Security Center

Sarah started off talking about the Azure Security Center feature. Security Center provides unified security management and threat protection for Azure workloads, workloads running on-premises and on other cloud platforms. It basically assesses the security of the cloud and on-premise workloads and offers out of the box insights. In addition, Security Center offers some built in security controls such as Just in Time VM access that will help to lock down access to virtual machines, and Adaptive Access Controls that help to lock down on machines to prevent any malware execution. Security Center also monitors the hybrid cloud using advanced concepts like Machine Learning and provides rich graphical data to administrators.

Security Center keeps a look into all the different incidents in the environment such as SQL Injection, security incidents, suspicious processes and so on and provides insights which will be very helpful for IT teams to keep a track of the issues in the environment.

At #MSIgnite, the Azure Security Center team introduced the new experience of Investigation Dashboard. With this feature, organizations can easily respond to the incident and understand the intricate details about the security incident. The investigation path defines the attack path and the graphical view displays the detailed information such as severity of the attack, attack detected by information and so on. The investigation dashboard also lists the entities and now supports the Playbooks that are nothing but Logic Apps being triggered from Security Center when a certain alert is fired.

You can run a Playbook from the Security Center through the integration with Azure Logic Apps. Users can pre-define a Logic App that will actually take a corrective action when there is an attack you can allow the investigation dashboard to automatically execute that particular Logic App (through Playbook) to execute the corrective action. For e.g., when a vulnerability attack is detected with a very high severity, post a message on the slack channel for the users to get notified.

After all these updates from Sarah, it was time for the Logic Apps trio comprising of Jeff Hollan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey to provide the latest updates on Logic Apps. Kevin Lam started off by giving the latest updates-

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1. Custom Connectors – Enables the option to extend your endpoints and register them as connectors in Logic Apps.
  2. Large Message Support – This functionality is now available in the designer. Using this functionality, you can move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP).
  3. Variables append to array – append capability to aggregate data within loops in the designer. Kevin Lam gave a pro tip here for all users –

    Remember to turn on sequential for for-each to achieve this scenario.

  4. Nested foreach and do-until – is now available in the designer.
  5. Enable high throughput scenarios – You can configure the number of scale units within the code view to enable the high throughput scenarios. Say, you can take one Logic App definition that runs in a scale unit and span it across 16/32/64 scale units to get increased throughput. This is called ludicrous mode (as Kevin had it on the PPT).
  6.  Maximum retries count (Custom Retry Policy) has been increased from 4 to 10.
  7. Now you can export (Publish) Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow
  8. Emit correlation tracking id from the trigger to OMS – This gives full traceability across the process that’s happening across the Logic App.
  9. Expression intellisense – This is now available in the designer. When you are typing an expression, you will see the same intelligent view that you see when you are typing in Visual studio.
  10. Schedule based batching – In addition to batching based on message count, you can batch messages based on the schedule.

New Connectors

  • Azure Security Center Trigger
  • Log Analytics Data Collector – add information to Log Analytics from Log Analytics
  • ServiceNow – create tickets, read & write into ServiceNow
  • DateTime Actions
  • Azure Event Grid Publish
  • Adobe Sign – This was a big announcement from Microsoft at #MSIgnite – collaboration with Adobe
  • O365 Groups
  • Skype for Business
  • LinkedIn
  • Apache Impala
  • FlowForma
  • Bizzy

What’s in Progress?

  1. Concurrency Control (code-view live) – Say, your Logic App is executing in a faster way than you want it to actually work. In this case, you can make Logic Apps to slow down (restrict the number of Logic Apps running in parallel). This is possible today in the code-view where you can define say, only 10 Logic Apps can execute at a particular time in parallel. Therefore, when 10 Logic Apps are executing in parallel, the Logic Apps logic will stop polling until one of the 10 Logic Apps finish execution and then start polling for data.
  2. SOAP – Native SOAP support to consume cloud and on-premise SOAP services. This is one of the most requested features on UserVoice.
  3. Expression Tracing –  You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
  4. Foreach failure navigation – If there are lots of iterations in the foreach loop and few of them failed; instead of having to look for which one actually failed, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.
  5. Functions + Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. This functionality will be going live by end of August.
  6. HTTP OAuth with Certificates
  7. Complex Conditions within the designer
  8. Bulk resubmit in OMS
  9. Batch configuration in Integration Account
  10. Connectors
    1. Workday
    2. Marketo
    3. Compute
    4. Containers

Watch the recording of this session here

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Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft will be delivering the keynote speech. You can also avail Day Passes for the event (available for Wednesday and Thursday).
  2. ServerlessConf – 2 days of sessions on Serverless with Hackathon during October 2017
  3. Workday Rising – October 9 – 12 at Chicago
  4. CONNECT 2017 on October 9, 2017 at DeFabrique, Utrecht

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!
Reach Out Azure Logic Apps Team

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Microsoft Flow Buttons Integration

Microsoft Flow Buttons Integration

Microsoft has been providing support for a lot of external services such as BTTN, Flic etc., to trigger a Microsoft Flow by pressing a button. BTTN is a physical button made by The Button Corporation, while Flic is an offering from Shortcut Labs. In this blog, we will take a look at how we can trigger a Microsoft Flow by integrating with BTTN service. Credits to the Microsoft team for offering these hooks to connect to external services.

Scenario

To explain the integration with Microsoft Flow buttons, let’s consider this scenario. We will have a virtual BTTN named Conference Room 1 Bttn which will be specific to a conference room at Contoso company. The purpose of this button is to seek immediate assistance from the IT Help desk team at Contoso for any issues in the conference room (such as WiFi not working, need extra VGA/HDMI cable connector, etc.,). When the virtual Bttn is pressed, a Microsoft Flow will run in the background that will automatically send an email to the IT Help desk team and notify them on their Microsoft Teams channel. When the agent picks up the case, the person who triggered the Bttn will be notified (via email) about the status of the ticket.

What is BTTN? How to get my BTTN?

BTTN or BT.TN is a very simple internet user interface which when pressed can be used to trigger any specific action. You can imagine BTTN as a physical button (Ex., the emergency red button on train engines or big machinery) which can trigger an action when pressed.

BTTN is available as a physical button for different purposes such as simple laundry pickup in one click, call a taxi with the click of a button, assistance when something is not right in the conference room, and so on. You can purchase these physical buttons from here.

BTTN has the built-in capability to integrate with the following services – Facebook, Twitter, Email, SMS, Microsoft Flows, IFTTT, Zapier, and HTTP.

Virtual BTTN

BTTN Corporation also has a virtual button (a smart cloud service) that has the capability to execute an action on one of the above-mentioned integrations in a couple of mouse clicks without having to write any code.

Getting your free Bttn

You can easily claim your virtual bttn from here. The virtual bttn is free of cost and you can use it for 30 days. Simply complete the cart payment step (of course without spending any money!) and you will see a confirmation message saying your virtual bttn will be delivered in 2 business days.

Registering your Bttn

However, it usually just takes about 6-8 hours for your virtual bttn to be delivered on to your mailbox. In the email, you will be presented with a link to register your bttn. Enter the Bttn device ID and the authentication code which is available in the registration link. These fields will be automatically populated if you click the link from your email. Accept the terms & privacy policy and click Register.

You will be prompted to create a password. Once done, log in with your email address and password. You will notice the screen that will display your virtual bttn.

  • Click Settings icon (gear icon) to change the name of your button to a meaningful name. Ex., Conference Room 1 Button

  • Click the Set Action icon (Lightning icon) to define the trigger for the Bttn — what action should be performed when the bttn is clicked. Ex., when bttn is pressed, execute a Microsoft Flow to send email to technical support team requesting assistance at the conference room.

  • Click the Rocket Launcher icon to launch your virtual bttn. We will hold on to this step for a while till we create the Flow execution steps.

Creating the Microsoft Flow

Now that we have created the virtual Bttn, let’s move to the next step of creating the Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Flow has pre-built Flow templates readily available for BTTN integration. In the search screen, enter “Bttn” to filter out the templates for Bttn.

We will use the predefined “Use Bttn to call technical support for meeting room” Microsoft Flow template for our scenario. Click the template.

To start using the template, you need to define the BTTN and authorize Microsoft Flow to be able to access the Bttn. Similarly, you need to configure Office 365 Outlook to be able to trigger emails when the Bttn is pressed.

Next, we will define the Flow steps to match our scenario.

Step 1: Trigger to execute when the Bttn is pressed

Step 2: Notification to Microsoft Teams Channel of IT Help desk team

Step 3: Trigger email with options (Acknowledge/Reject) to the support engineer

Step 4: Condition to execute depending on the option chosen by the support engineer. The ‘Yes’ block will execute if the support person acknowledges the request.

That’s it! You have now configured the Flow required for the scenario. Let’s see how the scenario will work in real time.

Demo

To get the scenario working, the first step is to trigger the virtual button. Navigate to your button home page and click the Rocket Launcher icon to launch your virtual bttn. You will see a new tab opening with a big red button (which is your virtual bttn that will trigger the Microsoft Flow that we created earlier). The status of the bttn will be in an Idle state.

Press the virtual Bttn once to trigger the Microsoft Flow. You will notice a yellow color light glowing around the button that signifies the Flow is executing. The status of the bttn will now be in the “Processing” state. Within the next few seconds, the IT Help desk team will receive the notification first on the Microsoft Teams channel with information about the issue.

The IT help desk team will also receive an email with acknowledgment options to their email id.

When the Acknowledge button is pressed, the flow will further execute to the condition part and execute the ‘Yes’ block that will trigger back a confirmation email to the registered bttn email id with the confirmation message.

Once the Flow is complete, you will notice that the status of the Flow button will be Green with the status as Positive Result.

Flow Run History and BTTN Logs

You can take a look at the Run History to view the list of runs of the flow and time taken to execute the flow.

Alternatively, you can take a look at the diagnostics information from the Bttn perspective through the Log section on your bttn homepage.

I hope you got a fair idea of how you can take advantage of Microsoft’s investment into integrating different services that open up a plethora of opportunities to integrate different systems. One of the slightest modifications to this scenario could be to directly log the issues into ServiceNow portal (if your organization is using ServiceNow for keeping track of the issues). You can use HTTP + Swagger action and define APIs for ServiceNow so that you can directly log tickets into ServiceNow from Microsoft Flow. Kent Weare demonstrated this scenario on Episode 27 of Middleware Friday. You can watch the video recording of the session here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – August 2017

Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – August 2017

You can really feel how time actually flies if you have attended the Azure Logic Apps Live webcast from the Logic Apps team. It feels just like yesterday when the team came online and presented a bunch of updates for the month of July and in no matter of time, here they were today (August 22) to present the next set of updates. I’ve always been fascinated by the commitment from the Logic Apps team in rolling out new features, organizing these monthly webcasts and responding to queries on the Twitter channel. Right, now on to the Jeff Hollan and Kevin Lam show!!! (Credits to Eldert Grootenboer for terming this during the webinar!)

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

  1.  Azure Event Grid – The newest and hottest kid in town; technical preview version was released by Microsoft on August 16th.

    What is Azure Event Grid??

    Azure Event Grid is the event-based routing as a service offering from Microsoft that aligns with their “Serverless” strategy. Azure Event Grid simplifies the Event Consumption logic by making it more of a “Push” mechanism rather than a “Pull” mechanism – meaning, you can simply listen to and react to events from different Azure services and other sources without having to constantly poll into each service and look for events. Azure Event Grid is definitely a game changing feature from Microsoft in the #Serverless space.

    The best example where you can use Azure Event Grid is to automatically get notified when any user makes a slight modification to the production subscription, or when you have multiple IoT devices pumping telemetry data.

    Azure Event Grid Connectors for Logic Apps

    At present, there is a Azure Event Grid Connector with only one trigger – Azure Event Grid – When a resource event occurs. You can use this connector to trigger events whenever a resource event occurs.

    The Logic Apps team is also working on adding a new connector – Publish Event which will be rolled out shortly. Using this connector, users can publish events (e.g., all events related to Serverless) into the Event Grid.

  2. Custom HTML and CSV headers – If you have an array of data (example, #Serverless on Twitter), you can easily convert the information into a CSV document or HTML table by using the “Create CSV Table” action. Later, you can pick up this CSV table and easily embed to an email.
  3. Enable Log Analytics from Create – More easier way to enable Log Analytics by toggling the status while creating the Logic App. You no longer need to go to the Diagnostics section to enable Log Analytics. Check out this detailed blog post that shows how you can enable Log Analytics while creating the Logic App.
  4. OMS Workspace Dashboard – Create a global dashboard for all the available Logic Apps under your subscription. View the status of the Logic App, number of runs and additional details. Check out this blog post on how you can integrate Azure Logic Apps and Log Analytics.
  5. Peek at code view – Say, you are working with Logic Apps and you add a connector. From now, you can easily switch between the code view and designer view by clicking “Peek code” from the Options drop down (….).


    Note: At present, the Peek code is available only in Read-Only mode. If you wish you need to edit the code directly from here, you can send the Logic Apps team a feedback on Twitter or through User Voice.
  6. Advanced Scheduling in the Logic Apps Designer – There are new options to schedule the Logic App execution on a Daily and Weekly basis. This was available in the code view but now you can get this experience right in the designer. Monthly update will be rolled out soon!

    In the Schedule trigger, you will notice that when you click on Week, there are few advanced operations available for you to define when you want the trigger to execute during a week. Say, you want your trigger to execute every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9:35 AM, 1:35 PM; 5:35 PM. The below screenshot depicts the example. The preview section will display the actual Logic App trigger condition based on the previous selections.

New Connectors

  • Azure Table Storage – This was one of the second most sought after connector from the community!
  • Azure Event Grid
  • Azure Log Analytics
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse
  • Microsoft StaffHub
  • MySQL (R/W)
  • ServiceNow (East US 2 region)
  • Amazon Redshift
  • DocFusion 365

What’s in Progress?

As usual, another long list of features that the Logic Apps team is currently working on and should be available in the coming weeks.

  1. Concurrency Control (code-view live) – Say, your Logic App is executing in a faster way than you want it to actually work. In this case, you can make Logic Apps to slow down (restrict the number of Logic Apps running in parallel). This is possible today in the code-view where you can define say, only 10 Logic Apps can execute at a particular time in parallel. Therefore, when 10 Logic Apps are executing in parallel, the Logic Apps logic will stop polling until one of the 10 Logic Apps finish execution and then start polling for data.
    NOTE: This works with the Polling Trigger (and not with Request Triggers such as Twitter connector etc) without SplitOn enabled.
  2. Custom Connectors – Get your own connector within your subscription so that your connector gets shown up on the list. This is currently in Private preview and should be available for public in the month of September.
  3. Large Files – Ability to move large files up to 1 GB (between) for specific connectors (blob, FTP). This is almost ready for release!
  4. SOAP – Native SOAP support to consume cloud and on-premise SOAP services. This is one of the most requested features on UserVoice.
  5. Variables (code-view live) – append capability to aggregate data within loops. The AppendToArray will be shipped soon, and AppendToString will come in the next few weeks.
  6. Expression intellisense – This functionality will go live on August 25th. Say, if you are typing an expression, you will see the same intelligent view that you see when you are typing in Visual studio.
  7. Expression Tracing –  You can actually get to see the intermediate values for complex expressions
  8. Foreach nesting in the designer – This capability will soon be incorporated into the designer in the coming few weeks.
  9. Foreach failure navigation – If there are 1000 iterations in the foreach loop and 10 of them failed; instead of having to look for which one actually failed, you can navigate to the next failed action inside a for each loop easily to see what happened.
  10. Functions + Swagger – You can automatically render the Azure functions annotated with Swagger. This functionality will be going live by end of August.
  11. Publish Logic Apps to PowerApps and Flow in a easy way
  12. Time based batching
  13. Upcoming Connectors
    1. Workday
    2. Feedly
    3. SQL Triggers (available in East US today but will be available across other regions in a few weeks)

Watch the recording of this session here

[embedded content]

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

  1. Integration Bootcamp on September 21-22, 2017 at Charlotte, North Carolina. This event will focus on BizTalk, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management and lots more.
  2. INTEGRATE 2017 USA – October 25 – 27, 2017 at Redmond. Register for the event today. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft will be delivering the keynote speech.
  3. New York Hackathon – September 5, 2017 – A first of its kind Hackathon event on September 5, 2017 at Microsoft Times Square office in Downtown, Washington. This hackathon will focus on Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure App Services, API Management and more. If you are interested to attend this hackathon, send the Logic Apps team a Tweet (DM), email.
  4. Microsoft Ignite – September 25—29, 2017 at Orlando, Florida – Sessions on Logic Apps, APIs, Integration, and Serverless

Why attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event?

Here’s a heads up as to why you have to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event.

Also check out this blog post that should get you convinced on why to attend INTEGRATE 2017 USA event: Read blog

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!
Reach Out Azure Logic Apps Team

Previous Updates

In case you missed the earlier updates from the Logic Apps team, take a look at our recap blogs here –

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan

Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring – PREVIEW

Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring – PREVIEW

The Azure Logic Apps team announced the preview version for Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring. Microsoft terms this release as “New Azure Logic Apps solution for Log Analytics”. The basic idea behind this brand new experience is to monitor and get insights about the Logic App runs with Operations Management Suite (OMS) and Log Analytics.

The new solution is very similar to the existing B2B OMS portal solution. Azure Logic Apps customers can continue to monitor their Logic Apps easily either via the OMS portal, Azure or even on the move with the OMS app.

What’s new in the preview of Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring Portal?

  • View all the Logic Apps run information
  • Status of Logic Apps (Success or Failure)
  • Details of failed runs
  • With Log Analytics in place, users can also set up alerts to get notified if something is not working as expected
  • Easily/quickly turn on Azure diagnostics in order to push the telemetry data from Logic App to the workplace

Enable OMS Monitoring for Azure Logic Apps

Follow the steps as listed below to enable OMS Monitoring for Logic Apps:

  1. Log in to your Azure Portal
  2. Search for “Log Analytics” (found under the list of services in the Marketplace), and then select Log Analytics.
  3. Click Create Log Analytics
  4. In the OMS Workspace pane,
    1. OMS Workspace – Enter the OMS Workspace name
    2. Subscription – Select the Subscription from the drop down
    3. Resource Group – Pick your existing resource group or create a new resource group
    4. Location – Choose the data center location where you want to deploy the Log Analytics feature
    5. Pricing Tier – The cost of workspace depends on the pricing tier and the solutions that you use. Pick the right pricing tier from the drop down.
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    6. Once you have created the OMS Workspace, create the Logic App. While creating the Logic App, enable Logic Analytics by pointing to the OMS workspace. For existing Logic Apps, you can enable OMS Monitoring from Monitoring > Diagnostics > Diagnostic settings.
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    7. Once you have created the Logic App, execute the Logic App with some run information
    8. Navigate back to the OMS Workspace that you created earlier. You will notice a message at the top of your screen asking you to upgrade the OMS workspace. Go ahead and do the upgrade process.
    9. Click Upgrade Now to start the Upgrade process
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    10. Once the upgrade is complete, you will see the confirmation message in the notifications area.
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    11. Under Management section, click OMS Portal
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    12. Click Solutions Gallery on the left menu
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    13. In the solutions list, select Logic Apps Management solution
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    14. Click Add to add the Logic Apps monitoring view to your OMS workspace. Note that this functionality is still in preview at the time of writing this blog.
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    15. You will see the status of your Logic App (No. of Runs, count of succeeded, running, and failed runs)
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
      NOTE: The Logic Apps run data did not appear immediately for me. I could see this data only in my third attempt (after selecting the region as West Central US, thanks to the tip from Steef-Jan Wiggers). Steef has also written a blog post about the Logic Apps and OMS integration capabilities. Therefore, please be ready to wait for some time to see the Logic App status on the OMS dashboard.
    16. Click the Dashboard area to view the detailed information
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    17. You can drill down the report by clicking on a particular status and viewing the detailed information
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring
    18. Click the record row to examine the run information in detail
      Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring

Therefore, you can now configure Monitoring and Diagnostics for Logic Apps directly into the OMS Portal which is very similar to the B2B messaging capabilities that existed earlier. I hope you found this blog useful in setting up Azure Logic Apps OMS Monitoring. I’m already excited for the next preview features to be rolled out from the Azure Logic Apps team.

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”. View all posts by Sriram Hariharan