We are currently evaluating BizTalk 360 at one of my clients at the moment and I plan to write a more detailed post in the future about our experiences but in the meantime I wanted to make a comment about something this week which was particularly useful.
We have a very large project with many teams and vendors and in our first integration test environment all of the delivery teams do daily deployments to this test environment. From here a successfully tested release could be promoted to other environments as required.
Its quite painful at times due to the pace of change in this first test environment and im sure most readers would be familiar with the typical challenges around integration and biztalk being the bit that identifies the problems and often not be the cause of the problem. Yes you know what I am talking about. A significant amount of my teams time is taken up with troubleshooting issues and working out retrospectively where a problem came from.
In our evaluations of BizTalk 360 one of the things I have done is to setup the BizTalk 360 health check emails to be published 4 times per day. This week we had a situation where the test teams had signed off a release but had not realised for some reason there was an issue where some messages were unable to be loaded into an application. This whole release had been signed off to go into the UAT environment and then an hour later the BizTalk 360 email came out and we could see these suspended messages. We were able to identify and rectify this issue in the application which was not accepting messages and plug the gap in the test scripts before the release went to UAT.
Finding this issue in the system test environment and resolving it would have saved a significant impact with the problems this issue could have caused in the UAT environment in terms of lost test time etc etc. In my opinion this one situation probably paid for the cost of the BizTalk 360 license on its own for our large scale project so hopefully our evaluation will be finished soon and we will be able to roll this out across other environments.
Thanks Saravana keep up the good work