Have you wanted to know what exactly BizTalk Server 2004 is doing at a giving instance? How many Orchestrations are about to Dehydrate? How about how many persistence points inside your Orchestration? Answers to these questions are easily available through BizTalk Performance Counters.
Aside on Persistence Points: Persistence Points are key when designing optimized Orchestrations. A Persistence Point is any time the Orchestration saves its current state back to the message box. The less Persistence Points you have, the better your Orchestration will perform. Persistence Points are caused by specific shapes inside your Orchestration like: Send, Parallel Action, Transactional Scopes, and others. Some more information is available in the help guide under “Persistence”
How to view the Performance Counters:
1. Go to the Start Menu and Select Run
2. Type in: perfmon and Enter
3. Performance Window should open up
4. Click on the + inside the window (or Ctrl-I)
5. Under Performance Objects, Select XLANG/s Orchestrations (note your host must be running)
6. Select the Counters from the list you want to watch, then press Add. You can get information on each by clicking on Explain.
7. Run your Orchestrations
My Favorite Performance Counters:
Orchestrations resident in memory
Pending messages
Persistence points
Running orchestrations
If you want to know exactly how many Persistence Points you have inside your Orchestration, just run it and watch the counter!
Take Away: Performance Counters in BizTalk 2004 can give you a clear picture on the current status of your Server and an idea of how well your Orchestrations will perform.
More information can be found on Performance Counters in the help guide. Just search for it.