Management and monitoring
Eventually I got through with the installation procedure, and got the portal up and running.
Being a BizTalk developer you are pretty much neglected from any kind of user-friendly experience. -This looks really good, and it seems easy to manage. Exceptions are caught, and nicely presented in various graphs and lists. Alerts can be set up and later subscribed to. BizTalk receive locations and send ports can be published to the uddi server and much more.
In my opinion, there are two main advantages with this portal. First of all, in my experience, BizTalk server is usually installed down in the deepest and darkest of catacombs, behind several firewalls and as far away from any user as possible. This makes it somewhat challenging for the support personnel since they need to use the BizTalk Administration Console. The BizTalk Administration Console, as you may know, need to to connect to the management database directly, wish pretty much puts our support guys behind the same firewalls. However, using the ESB portal, you'll still need the BizTalk console, but you might at least delegate some of the operational tasks to colleagues on the other side of the wall.
The second benefit is all about exception handling. Usually, we need to handle exceptions differently depending whether it is caught in a mapping, pipeline or orchestration. ESB Guidance solves this by relying on failed message routing. Exceptions are routed to the All.Exceptions Send Port (SQL Adapter) which stores the data in the EsbExceptionDb database. From this source, all exceptions are presented in a unified way in the portal. – Sweet!
ESB Guidance part 3