by Rochelle Saldanha | Aug 1, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Imagine having just purchased BizTalk Server, and you need to get it up and running with all the monitoring setup for the various artifacts, etc. You are just finding your legs and can find it difficult to understand all the various aspects of the product.
When our new customers on board with us they often want to get started with the product immediately and see it in action. They want the alarms setup and see how the monitoring features works.
Being a part of the Support & Client Relationship team, often when introducing new customers to our product BizTalk360 we have encountered this question –
Do you have a quick Alarm setup that will setup some alarms for us, for each of the applications?
So, it has been in our pipeline for some time now to bring something useful in Alarm creation to help our customers.
One of our technical Leads – Lex Hegt had already written an article sometime back to achieve the same. I thought a fresh blog on it might help those who have not come across it.
Kovai.BizTalk360.CreateAlarms.exe is a windows application which uses some Nuget-packages.
All you need to have to run this application is
- URL of BizTalk360
- A BizTalk360 authorized Windows Account
Typically, in your BizTalk environment, you will manually create your BizTalk360 Alerts after the BizTalk application has been deployed. Most of our customers use BizTalk360 Alerts to monitor the state of the different artifacts.
To minimize the amount of effort required, or if you are new to the product … there is a way to automate the alarm creation which will save some of your productive time.
This application has been specifically designed with that goal in mind. It will go through your applications and create Alarms with all the Send Ports, Receive Locations & Orchestrations mapped for monitoring.
Setup Steps
- You can specify the state you are interested in monitoring in the ‘Create Alarm’ setup page when you start the Application.
- You can also ensure that the alarms are Disabled so you can go through them to check if they are as per your expectations before you enable them for use.
NOTE
Any existing alarms created with the Application Name only will be deleted, as this is the alarm that the application generates (It creates Alarms based on the Application name).
- You can also setup certain parameters that you generally setup in the Alarm creation page – E.g. Violation persists (minutes) & ‘limit the no of Alerts’ & ‘Notify on success’.
The alarms created will be Threshold Monitoring Alarms.
With this kind of monitoring, you get notified in case a threshold occurs. For example, that can be a Receive Location which was Disabled, while it should be Enabled or any other artefact which is mapped in the alarm and is in an unexpected state.
While the original application along with its code is still available, we have provided this downloadable exe with a few changes, as the API’s for BizTalk360 have changed since then.
So, I hope this executable helps those who are looking for a quick Alarm setup for all the basic artifact monitoring. Of course, once these alarms are created per application, you can edit them and then add more artifacts as required so you have a fully monitored BizTalk server environment.
You can write to us at [email protected]. Have a try at our latest version by downloading a 14-day free trial of BizTalk360.
by Raja Sreenivasan | Jul 27, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
With this release of BizTalk360(v8.5), the user can customize email template. The earlier version of BizTalk360 only has a capability to change the color of the email body, font, logo, background, footer background etc. Most of our customer had requested to customize the email alert with more comprehensive improvements, so we have revamped the email template module with more additional functionalities to simplify and customize the email notification. This allows to create and manage custom templates for notifications.
The user can able to create a template with an in-built XSLT validator with preview options. Email template can be used in different alarms with light or dark theme, which helps to
• grab the support team’s attention to take on the relevant actions.
• choose different theme templates to indicate different business cases.
• easily identify which template belongs to which environment.
So, let’s us look how to create a template in the newer version of BizTalk360.
Creating Template
In BizTalk360, Manage Email Template can be found in the monitoring and notification section of setting side. While installing the newer version, the default template “BizTalk360 Email Template” will be used for all the existing or newly created alarm.
For creating a new template, click on “NEW” icons as shown in above picture, a blade opens for providing the basic details like template name, description of the template, toggle button for making it as default template as shown in the picture below.
In the following section, the user can edit and provide their own data like display name, email address, logo text, footer text etc.same as previous versions for a better manageability.
Theme
Initially, BizTalk360 provides a default template “BizTalk360 Email Template” with a light elegant theme. Themes are also available in two variants light and dark. A user can able to choose light or dark theme while creating a template.
However, the earlier version of BizTalk360 email colors are chosen by selecting colors from color picker and here we came up with the idea of providing “themes” instead of simply selecting the color code for the email template.
We categorized themes into two
• Light Theme
• Dark Theme
Light Theme
Dark Theme
We are not restricting the user to simply selecting light or dark theme, we have also provisioned to edit the themes.
Under the edit theme color settings, a user can choose 6 Body BG color which represents different themes for light and dark. Once the theme is selected, “PREVIEW TEMPLATE” option is being provided to cross check the desired changes on a new blade.
Once the template is created, it will be displayed in the main grid of Manage Email Templates page.
XSLT
BizTalk360 uses XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) as a styling language for customizing the email template. The XSLT file editing option is being provided to a user for changing font family and font size. “Please do not change any logic in XSLT file, as this might corrupt the mailing functionality”. This facility is available in the edit section of each template by clicking the edit gear icon.
Once the changes are made in the XSLT file, the inbuilt XSLT validator verifies the XSLT file and allows the user to save the file after successful verification.
The “Preview Template” option is provided in edit section to make sure the desired changes have been made in XSLT file.
Alarm Configuration
In the alarm configuration section, we have customized for a user-friendliness to choose the template that has been created at the manage email module. Also, we made the notification channel to be available in the Alarm configuration page itself. We have made the email configuration optional if the notification channel is being enabled so that either one of the choices can serve the purpose.
Conclusion
BizTalk360 already had a feature to format email template, with its latest release v8.5 it fills the gap by adding the ability to customize, create and manage template for different alarms based on user preference. Keep your mailing color codes intact with your thoughts using our customized email template feature. If you have any feedback or suggestion, please feel free to write to us at [email protected].
