This post disappeared from a previous blog of mine so I'm reposting it.
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Are you read to take your BizTalk Server 2004 application to production?
Integration applications are usually very complex; they have a lot of moving pieces, they use many different technologies and they are often built to automate processes that are not understand nearly as well as the business units involved think they are understood. In addition to the technical problems related to integration applications, integration problems have a corresponding set of issues centered around communication difficulties. Often these communication difficulties arise because the different teams involved in the project do not understand ant technologies other than their own, because people of various technical levels are involved in project and because project teams do not reside at the same physical location.
Because of these complexities it is easy to overlook items that should be handled prior to your BizTalk Server 2004 application going live. The article contains suggestions for items you should resolve prior to going live.
Deployment
- Is your deployment automated? Fully automated?
- Have you defined your rollback procedures?
Application Architecture Review
- Have you covered all of your error handling scenarios from you requirements?
- Will HAT provide all of the necessary debugging, process analysis and replay requirements for your application? If not you may need to
- Database recovery, backups, failover, etc.
- Logging – where, how, when?
- How are you going to monitor you application and environment? What happens after hours? Have you considered Microsoft Operations Manager?
- How are you going to implement notification? Who gets notified? When? Will you filter so that you don't send out notifications for each and every BizTalk related event log entry?
- Will you have enough information to debug your problems (they will occur!)?