This post was originally published here
Event logs are normally used to inform about an important event in the running applications and subsystems, which plays a vital role in troubleshooting problems.
While monitoring multi-server environments, how many times in a day does your administration team log in to multiple servers to check for the root cause of a problem? Have you ever thought of a tool that could help you avoid this time-consuming process? Yes, BizTalk360’s in-built Advanced Event Viewer (AEV) helps you solve this business problem.
Set-up AEV to retrieve the event data you want from your BizTalk and SQL servers in your environment and display it all in a single screen, where you can use the rich query capabilities to search and analyze the data.
How to Set Up AEV in BizTalk360
As a first step, in BizTalk360 settings, you need to configure event logs and event sources that you want to monitor and then Enable AEV for the environment. Now the BizTalk360 Monitoring service will collect event log data for all the configured servers in that environment and store it in BizTalk360 DB.
What ‘s new in v8.6?
BizTalk360 already supports AEV in operations and monitoring section for a long time. While demonstrating BizTalk360 to customers, we asked for “How to monitor a specific event occurring in BizTalk environments on a specific frequency and get an alert based on Threshold conditions”. So, keeping that in mind we have implemented Event Log Data Monitoring in version v8.6.
Let us take this complex scenario to understand more about Event Log Data Monitoring.
Scenario1: User wants to monitor different event logs for multiple servers. Example: If an administrator wants to monitor ESB events from BizTalk server and also wants to ensure there is no problem in SQL servers and also to monitor ENTSSO events form SSO server.
Start Monitoring Event log Data in 3 Steps:
- Enable AEV for an environment
- Create a Data Monitoring Alarm
- Create a schedule under event log and configure the rich filtering conditions based on your business needs as below.
Server Type : BizTalk, SQL Server Names :BizTalk Server ,SQL Server,SSO Server Event Type: Error Event Sources: ESB Itinerary Selector, ENTSSO , MSSQLSERVER, And group (All these below conditions are true) Event ID Greater than or equal to 3010 Event ID Less than or equal to 3034 Message Contains 'ESB.ItineraryServices.Generic.WCF/ProcessItinerary.svc' EventID IS Between 10500-10550 Message Contains ‘SSO Database’
When we looked in more detail, it would normally take us into running a filtering query against configured event sources in servers and alert them when certain conditions are met.
Scenario 2: To detect the same event occurring on different servers. For example, when a certain instance of an orchestration is firstly executed on server 1 and throwing a certain error and next to another instance of the same orchestration throws the same error, while the instance becomes executed on server 2, this will now easily be detected with event log data monitoring.
BizTalk360 brings all these data into a single console and on top of that provides a powerful capability to set alerts based on various thresholds.
You can also set how frequently you wanted to run the queries based on their business requirements such as the frequency of daily validations (ex every 15 mins, 1 hour etc), end of business day or even monthly events such as month-end processing. With these thresholds, the result from the query will be evaluated and in case of any threshold violation, you will be notified via notification channels/Email.
Event Log Details in Alerts
Event Log Details will be listed in alerts by enabling the option ‘Send Event Log details in Mail’ while creating the schedule.
Event Log data in the Data Monitoring Dashboard
Also, the information will be visible on the Data Monitoring dashboard, you can visualize the day calendar view. If you need to understand what happened for an execution, you can click on one of the entries in the day view of the dashboard and view the details as shown below.
Note :
- Maintenance is very simple, once after scheduling event log data monitoring, when you disable AEV for the environment, it will stop collecting Event Log data.
- And you don’t Worry about data growth, BizTalk360 purge policy will take care of it.
- Apart from monitoring BizTalk specific SQL server, you can also monitor other SQL servers simply by adding SQL server names for monitoring in the settings section.