by Rochelle Saldanha | May 30, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
At BizTalk360, we provide some essential services which benefit the customers and our partners immensely. Businesses trust and use our expertise to assist them on a wide range of projects relating to their BizTalk needs. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Setting up our monitoring product BizTalk360 and integrating their BizTalk servers.
- Advising on the best practices used in the community for monitoring.
- Helping in BizTalk migration projects via support and licensing discounts.
- In-Depth training and advice on end to end BizTalk solutions.
There are 3 types of services we offer, namely:
- Product Demos
- Best Practice and Installation service
- In-Depth Training for BizTalk360
Product Demos
Demos can turn prospects into customers. They combat client concerns and provide proof what the product can do for you (our customers). Customers often want to see it in action before they commit to a purchase. We also offer a Free Trial as well.
Free Trial of BizTalk360
It gives the customer the best opportunity to experience what it would be like to own the product
Most of the times, we are approached by the customers themselves who googled and came across our product BizTalk360 and want to know more about it.
Sometimes we are approached by consultants who say “We love your product and need your help to convince Management to get it for our company”.
We also give Demos to our Partners as well to keep them well-equipped and confident in the product.
BizTalk360 Demo – Request one today!
We avoid giving generic demos. We try to learn about our audience’s specific challenges and what they want to achieve and tailor the demo accordingly. We want customers to feel empowered and be confident of the product they are going to be purchasing. The customer should be happy that BizTalk360 is going to be a good fit for their requirements.
We have also printed some documentation which outlines all the main features of BizTalk360 – What’s the business value of using Biztalk360, which we will be giving out at our upcoming INTEGRATE 2017 event.
Best Practice installation and configuration
Customers like hearing about best practices, especially if they’re easy to implement and will result in an immediate benefit. We provide this service to help set up BizTalk360 at the customer site. While the actual setup can be quite simple and quick to setup, depending on your environment you might face some issues. We provide a 2-hour service (chargeable) where we set up the product (via a web call) and go through a few basic setup tasks
- SMTP settings – These are the first thing to setup to ensure that the notifications for any alarm are successfully sent.
- User access policy – Add user specific permissions to view different parts of the product.
- Setting up Alarms/Monitoring Dashboard – Monitoring artifacts is the core of our product. We explain the types of alarms available, which are more suited to certain scenarios. The dashboard helps you to see all the status of artifacts mapped in 1 look.
- Monitoring of SQL Servers
- Event Log setup – This will enable you to view Windows logs across multiple BizTalk servers
- Purging Policy – This will help set up purging to avoid bloating of the database.
Often a simple task can also turn out to be complex when dealing with multiple environments. A lot of our customers also take this opportunity for their BizTalk administrators to get a quick crash course in the product to see how they can utilize the product in the best way possible.
Some important troubleshooting steps during installation
- Try to run the MSI using logs, so if any issues occur they are detailed in the logs.
- Once the installation is complete successfully, if the home page is not displayed and you see any errors like Icons/images missing – Check the ‘Static content’ tickbox is activated under ‘IIS’ in Server Manager -> Add Roles & Features
- If you are Installing BizTalk360 on a complete standalone server and there is no trace of the remote BizTalk environment we are going to configure. Simply enter the corresponding values for BizTalkMgmtSqlInstanceName and BizTalkMgmtDb columns as shown below.
- If it doesn’t help, kindly run the troubleshooter tool on the machine where BizTalk360 is installed. Troubleshooter will help you to find any permissions missed.
We are soon releasing a ‘User Guide’ of around 400 pages for the basic setup tasks required when you install BizTalk360 – written by Eva De Jong and Lex Hegt. Please look out for it at our ‘INTEGRATE 2017’ event.
BizTalk360 Training
BizTalk360 has a lot of features which can be quite overwhelming for someone new. Many companies appreciate an in-depth intensive BizTalk360 training. This is an 8-hour training that we provide and is given by our BizTalk Server & BizTalk360 Product experts.
This session is covered over 4 days in 2-hour slots (or as desired by customer). The main idea is for customers to get a better understanding of how the product can help them achieve certain scenarios. Our experts interact with the audience and understand the environment and architecture and what customizations they want to achieve.
Initially, they go through the various features available in BizTalk360, then on subsequent days the trainer does a deep dive and goes through more technical complicated scenarios and how the customer can benefit from the product. Many customers use this as a training session for their technical staff. This is conducted via a remote webinar session (GoToMeeting) and is a very interactive and a good learning experience for most customers. The session is not a straightforward monologue but it provides plenty of space for the customer to pose questions regarding their own circumstances.
Exciting upcoming Services/Training
We also have a new training for ‘BizTalk Server Administrators’ run by our very own BizTalk expert Lex Hegt.
The audience would be Systems Administrators who deploy and manage (multi-server) BizTalk Server environments, SQL Server DBA’s who are responsible for maintaining the BizTalk Server databases or BizTalk Developers who need to support a BizTalk environment.
During this course, attendees will get a thorough training for everything they need to know to properly administer BizTalk Server.
Some of the course topics are:
- Installing and configuring BizTalk Groups
- Operating and monitoring BizTalk Server
- Deployment of BizTalk applications
- Periodical administrative tasks and best practices.
Keep tuned to our website for more such information or contact [email protected] to arrange the same.
by Sivaramakrishnan Arumugam | May 12, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Every year BizTalk360 releases with 3 or 4 major versions (with few minor patch releases addressing critical bugs) with new key features with every major release. From Version 8.2.2385.2511, we started to support BizTalk Server 2016 RTM. Once after the release, we faced a strange case that the customers were not able to view the Context properties and Message Content in BizTalk360, but the customer is able to view the properties and content in the BizTalk Server Administration Console.
Strange enough, before BizTalk Server 2016 RTM, we were able to view the Content properties and Message content in BizTalk360 with the BizTalk Server customer preview versions. Once after the upgrade to the RTM release, we started to face this case.
From the exception message, we found that some DLL is missing and when we asked to check that dll at the customer’s end, we found that it was missing. Then we proceeded the case on how the DLL was eliminated, we found that the DLL, Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams, was removed by BizTalk itself.
Use of Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams.dll
Let’s have a look at the use of Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams. By default, BizTalk server stores the message body parts in the Parts table and context in the Spool table in the BizTalkMessageBoxDb. The message is inserted in the tables through the bts_InsertMessage Stored Procedure. The values in these columns of the message part and context are respectively encrypted or they might be compressed. The messages stay in the Spool table only while they’re in flight being processed by BizTalk. Then they are removed and optionally moved to the tracking database. If you stop the send port or orchestration that is subscribing to the messages (but leave them enlisted) they will sit on the Spool and Parts tables for you to check them out. There are also a few messages that stay in the Spool table that are for the messaging agent cache and not the usual BizTalk messages.
As the XML is compressed, the clue is to use a Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams.Decompress method. From the Microsoft.BizTalk.Pipeline.dll the message body content and context can be retrieved and viewed. The bts_GetTrackedMessageParts stored procedure inside the tracking database expects the message GUID and will return the compressed message data back. We can then use reflection to invoke the Decompress method of the Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams class inside Microsoft.BizTalk.Pipeline.dll to decompress the data returned from SQL.
Where the Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams.dll went?
When we deeply investigated the case why the DLL is missing, we are able to find that the methods of the Microsoft.BizTalk.Message.Interop.CompressionStreams DLL were moved under Microsoft.BizTalk.StreamProcessing.
Use of Microsoft.BizTalk.StreamProcessing.dll
Stream processing saves programs from having to load data entirely into memory.
Instead, a program gets a hold on a stream instead of the actual data. The program then starts asking the stream to send a chunk of the data. BizTalk implements a forward-only streaming design. Forward-only means that the stream can only be read, and cannot be sought back. Out of the box pipelines are stream-based; they utilize streaming when fetching data from the adapter and as data passes from one stage to another. For example, out-of-the-box components such as the Flat-File Disassembler and the XML Disassembler, are built with streaming in mind.
We changed in the BizTalk360 source code to support BizTalk Server 2016 and refer to Microsoft.BizTalk.StreamProcessing.
If you have any suggestions or feedback, you can write to us at [email protected]. Have a try at our latest version by downloading a 14-day free trial of BizTalk360.
Read: BizTalk360 Supports for BizTalk Server 2016
Author: Sivaramakrishnan Arumugam
Sivaramakrishnan is our Support Engineer with quite a few certifications under his belt. He has been instrumental in handling the customer support area. He believes Travelling makes happy of anyone. View all posts by Sivaramakrishnan Arumugam
by Swetha Mohandas | May 11, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
In BizTalk360 v8.4, we have enriched the existing NT services and SQL server jobs section by providing the operation’s ability. Earlier, both the sections only list out the NT services and SQL server jobs available in the environment. Governance and Auditing are also enabled for the NT services operations which are performed within BizTalk360.
A quick overview of NT services:
NT services run quietly and independently in the background of Microsoft Windows.
Beforehand NT services in BizTalk360:
In earlier versions of BizTalk360, it was only possible to view the NT services in the operations section for the configured environment.
In the Monitoring section, NT Services status can be monitored and the Auto healing ability is available. Whenever a violation happens, the user will be getting the email alerts through their configured Notification channel (Email, SMS, HP operations Manage, Slack, Service Now and Webhook channels)).
Where can you find the NT service operation for BizTalk server and SQL server
BizTalk Server ->NT Services:
We have added NT services section in two areas one is under BizTalk server section. Here you can access the NT service and perform all the operation.
SQL Server>>NT services:
As requested by customers, we introduce a new section in the v8.4 to operate on SQL servers. Here you can access the NT services of your SQL server, that is once you configure the SQL server under the setting side. After configuring the SQL server, the respective server name will be shown under SQL server section. We aware already showing the BizTalk Server CPU and Memory usage statistics as a graph format, but as of v8.4, you can do the same for SQL servers. Analytics can visible only those who can access to the analytics section.
What are all the operations that can be performed in the NT services?
You can perform all the possible operations (start/stop/pause/restart) as done in Services.msc console in Windows OS. But now you no need to context switch to the services window on your server for performing the operations.
The below screenshot shows what are all the operation abilities provided by BizTalk360 for the NT Services.
We make sure auditing activity for NT service operation:
Security(Governance) is one of the core features of BizTalk360.It provides the precise access to the support people. We have auditing activities for Application(Start/Stop), Service instance activity, Host Instance activity, Business rule Activity and we have added server activity in the v8.4 version where you can see all the activities performed for NT services. We represent the activity based on which section you would perform. If you perform any operation under the BizTalk server NT services, we represent as BizTalk next to the server name. Otherwise, you perform the operation on the SQL server will represent as SQL.
Live Feed Activity
We are showing the server activity under the Live Feed section the same as what we are showing in the Governance & Auditing section.
We make sure for periodic purging
For every application, purging is very important criteria to prevent the data growth and improve the performance of the application. You can configure the purging of Governance and Auditing by navigating Setting>>BizTalk360Health>>Data Purging>>Governance and auditing. The default purging value is 3 months.
Licensing Clarification
The existing licensing policy will remain the same. There is no licensing change for this feature. This feature applicable for all the license tier since it is coming under the Bronze tier, anyone who has got Bronze or a higher tier will enjoy this feature.
Performance of the System
One important thing to be noted while performing the NT services is that there will be a performance lag while doing the bulk operations. Sometimes it may crash your system also. For some of the NT services, performing the operations will affect the performance of the system in both Service console and as well as in BizTalk360. For this kind of situation, we should be wise enough to secure the system from the performance lag.
Migration Scenario:
During the migration from the previous version, the NT services operation ability will be enabled in the BizTalk Server section. A new Menu will be added in the Operations->Infrastructure settings and you can view the SQL server NT services and CPU and Memory utilization graph section.
Conclusion
BizTalk360 already had features to monitor NT services. With its latest release 8.4, it fills the gap by bringing in the capability of performing the NT service operations. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please write to us at [email protected]. Have a try at our latest version by downloading a 14-day free trial of BizTalk360.
Author: Swetha Mohandas
Test Engineer at BizTalk360. Software Test Engineer having good knowledge of SDLC and STLC. Love to test the software product. View all posts by Swetha Mohandas
by Saravana Kumar | May 9, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
About 10-12 years ago (around 2004-2005), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was a big topic in the enterprise world. Massive projects were initiated to align enterprises to be more service oriented with a middleware/ESB platform like BizTalk Server in the middle.
When we talked about SOA implementation using Microsoft technologies during this period, only two technologies/platform stood out –
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
WCF was set of libraries built on top of the .NET Framework that helped to build SOAP based (later REST support was added) web services. WCF was more of a platform that shipped along with the .NET Framework and evolved gradually along with the .NET releases. BizTalk Server, on the other hand, was a full blown Enterprise Server Product that acted as a Middleware platform mainly addressing the challenge of not creating an integration spaghetti between those services (represented as APP in below pictures) created using WCF.
| Without BizTalk Server |
With BizTalk Server |
|
|
BizTalk360 journey between 2011 – 2016
When we started BizTalk360 back in 2010, the objectives were pretty straight forward. Nearly 10,000 medium to large organisations have invested in Microsoft BizTalk Server to address their integration requirements.
We spotted a lot of gaps in BizTalk Server when it comes to BizTalk Server day-to-day administration and monitoring. It looked like a straightforward bet to build a world-class product that can help these 10,000+ customers to improve their operational efficiency.
We started off initially with BizTalk360 as a monitoring solution for BizTalk Server and the product slowly evolved into addressing various operational and analytics needs of the BizTalk Server. There are over 100 features in the product now covering various aspects of day-to-day operational needs like Security, Governance/Auditing, Monitoring, Analytics, Productivity Tools, Knowledge Base, Rich Dashboards, etc. making it a must have add-on product for any Microsoft BizTalk Server customers.
BizTalk360 currently has over 500 enterprise customers, and we are proud to say that Microsoft itself is one of our biggest customers. Microsoft internally uses BizTalk Server for all of their IT and Supply Chain requirements and they rely on BizTalk360 for their day-to-day operations. You can read the case study “Why Microsoft chose BizTalk360 instead of SCOM”
What is the state of Integration today in Microsoft Stack?
In the last 5-6 years, the innovation around technology exploded in all directions. Cloud and mobile became mainstream and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM pumped a lot of investment into the cloud. On the other hand, SaaS (Software as a Service) based products exploded in other direction. Today, no one really wants to buy off-the-shelf software products, run their own servers and manage upgrades and patches. They simply want to use software or services provided by the third party rather than owning them. About 10-15 years ago, SIEBEL was the leader in CRM space, however, today that segment is ruled by technologies like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Similar story exists in all software segments like Source Control (GIT and Visual Studio Team Service), Productivity Tools (Office365, Google Apps), Email (Office365, Google) etc.
With all these changes, it’s natural for Integration Platforms and Products to evolve as well. The role of integration has become so immense in the last 5 years due to the above mentioned reasons. Today, companies buy/use multiple software products which do one thing really well rather than living with a monolithic beast software which claims to do everything but not good at anything.
This change in attitude also means all these independent software product/services need to talk to each other, which created a new segment of integration products in the likes of IFTTT, Zapier, Azure Logic Apps, SnapLogic, Dell Boomi, etc
Microsoft responded well to this growing challenge in the integration space, addressing the requirements of: Hybrid Integration solutions (the combination of Cloud + On-Premise integrations), Quick & Easy integration solutions, Business Users (aka citizen integrators) integration solutions etc.
If you look at Microsoft Integration Stack today, it’s not just BizTalk Server and WCF anymore. There are at least a dozen products/services that are mainly geared towards Integration in Microsoft Stack.
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
- ASP.NET Web API’s
- Azure Logic Apps
- Azure App Services (Web Jobs)
- Azure Functions (Serverless Compute)
- Azure API Management
- Azure Service Bus (Queues/Topics)
- Azure Stream Analytics
- Azure Event Hubs
- Microsoft PowerApps
- Microsoft Flow
- Azure Gateway (Hybrid Connection)
BizTalk360 – 2017 and beyond
One of the key aspects of a product company like us is that we need to be on the forefront of technology all the time. We need to adapt quickly to the change and understand the fact “change is the only constant”. We cannot just sit back and relax saying BizTalk360 is doing well. We have been closely monitoring the trend what’s going on, what will happen to the existing BizTalk Server customers in the next 10-15 years.
We are fortunate enough to build up a close relationship with Microsoft and the Integration community and are fully aware of the changes that are happening around Integration.
BizTalk360 is now slowly evolving into a product that will cater for the big picture. We wanted to create a single unified tool that will help any customer who invested in Microsoft platform for their integration needs.
We can clearly see the challenges that are building up when you have so many technologies included in a solution. There is no single management tool that will cater for the day-to-day operations. Customers might end up using BizTalk Server Admin Console for some of the activities and Azure Portal for some of the other activities, which is not productive and you are never going to be confident you set up access rights correctly across multiple tools, educating support people how to operate and monitor your solutions.
There are various other challenges like, for example, for Monitoring, you will need an end-to-end monitoring solution that covers both on-prem and cloud, you will also need tracking and analytics solution that will stretch between on-prem and cloud etc. We predict customers might end up building management tools, exactly like what they did 10 years ago for BizTalk solutions. BizTalk360 was born to address the challenge faced by BizTalk Server customers.
Today we are at a juncture where we see the same challenge at a bigger level and BizTalk360 is well positioned to address that challenge since we are already halfway through covering the on-premise solution.
What available and what’s coming in BizTalk360
We realized this situation almost 2 years ago and started expanding BizTalk360 to cover both on-premise and cloud technologies that fall into the Integration bucket with a vision of creating a single unified management and monitoring tool for Microsoft Integration.
Today, BizTalk360, in addition to its full blown support for BizTalk Server, can also manage and monitor related Azure Integration Technologies like
In the upcoming 8.5 version (planned for July 2017), we are bringing in support for Azure Integration Accounts, App Services, and Azure Stream Analytics.
We are also working on a secret project with a bigger vision, which I cannot talk much at this stage (stay tuned).
We will continue our investment in this direction and make BizTalk360 a single must have tool for anyone using Microsoft Technologies for their Integration Requirements.
Author: Saravana Kumar
Saravana Kumar is the Founder and CTO of BizTalk360, an enterprise software that acts as an all-in-one solution for better administration, operation, support and monitoring of Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. View all posts by Saravana Kumar
by Saravana Kumar | May 9, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
About 10-12 years ago (around 2004-2005), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was a big topic in the enterprise world. Massive projects were initiated to align enterprises to be more service oriented with a middleware/ESB platform like BizTalk Server in the middle.
When we talked about SOA implementation using Microsoft technologies during this period, only two technologies/platform stood out –
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
WCF was set of libraries built on top of the .NET Framework that helped to build SOAP based (later REST support was added) web services. WCF was more of a platform that shipped along with the .NET Framework and evolved gradually along with the .NET releases. BizTalk Server, on the other hand, was a full blown Enterprise Server Product that acted as a Middleware platform mainly addressing the challenge of not creating an integration spaghetti between those services (represented as APP in below pictures) created using WCF.
| Without BizTalk Server |
With BizTalk Server |
|
|
BizTalk360 journey between 2011 – 2016
When we started BizTalk360 back in 2010, the objectives were pretty straight forward. Nearly 10,000 medium to large organisations have invested in Microsoft BizTalk Server to address their integration requirements.
We spotted a lot of gaps in BizTalk Server when it comes to BizTalk Server day-to-day administration and monitoring. It looked like a straightforward bet to build a world-class product that can help these 10,000+ customers to improve their operational efficiency.
We started off initially with BizTalk360 as a monitoring solution for BizTalk Server and the product slowly evolved into addressing various operational and analytics needs of the BizTalk Server. There are over 100 features in the product now covering various aspects of day-to-day operational needs like Security, Governance/Auditing, Monitoring, Analytics, Productivity Tools, Knowledge Base, Rich Dashboards, etc. making it a must have add-on product for any Microsoft BizTalk Server customers.
BizTalk360 currently has over 500 enterprise customers, and we are proud to say that Microsoft itself is one of our biggest customers. Microsoft internally uses BizTalk Server for all of their IT and Supply Chain requirements and they rely on BizTalk360 for their day-to-day operations. You can read the case study “Why Microsoft chose BizTalk360 instead of SCOM”
What is the state of Integration today in Microsoft Stack?
In the last 5-6 years, the innovation around technology exploded in all directions. Cloud and mobile became mainstream and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM pumped a lot of investment into the cloud. On the other hand, SaaS (Software as a Service) based products exploded in other direction. Today, no one really wants to buy off-the-shelf software products, run their own servers and manage upgrades and patches. They simply want to use software or services provided by the third party rather than owning them. About 10-15 years ago, SIEBEL was the leader in CRM space, however, today that segment is ruled by technologies like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Similar story exists in all software segments like Source Control (GIT and Visual Studio Team Service), Productivity Tools (Office365, Google Apps), Email (Office365, Google) etc.
With all these changes, it’s natural for Integration Platforms and Products to evolve as well. The role of integration has become so immense in the last 5 years due to the above mentioned reasons. Today, companies buy/use multiple software products which do one thing really well rather than living with a monolithic beast software which claims to do everything but not good at anything.
This change in attitude also means all these independent software product/services need to talk to each other, which created a new segment of integration products in the likes of IFTTT, Zapier, Azure Logic Apps, SnapLogic, Dell Boomi, etc
Microsoft responded well to this growing challenge in the integration space, addressing the requirements of: Hybrid Integration solutions (the combination of Cloud + On-Premise integrations), Quick & Easy integration solutions, Business Users (aka citizen integrators) integration solutions etc.
If you look at Microsoft Integration Stack today, it’s not just BizTalk Server and WCF anymore. There are at least a dozen products/services that are mainly geared towards Integration in Microsoft Stack.
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
- ASP.NET Web API’s
- Azure Logic Apps
- Azure App Services (Web Jobs)
- Azure Functions (Serverless Compute)
- Azure API Management
- Azure Service Bus (Queues/Topics)
- Azure Stream Analytics
- Azure Event Hubs
- Microsoft PowerApps
- Microsoft Flow
- Azure Gateway (Hybrid Connection)
BizTalk360 – 2017 and beyond
One of the key aspects of a product company like us is that we need to be on the forefront of technology all the time. We need to adapt quickly to the change and understand the fact “change is the only constant”. We cannot just sit back and relax saying BizTalk360 is doing well. We have been closely monitoring the trend what’s going on, what will happen to the existing BizTalk Server customers in the next 10-15 years.
We are fortunate enough to build up a close relationship with Microsoft and the Integration community and are fully aware of the changes that are happening around Integration.
BizTalk360 is now slowly evolving into a product that will cater for the big picture. We wanted to create a single unified tool that will help any customer who invested in Microsoft platform for their integration needs.
We can clearly see the challenges that are building up when you have so many technologies included in a solution. There is no single management tool that will cater for the day-to-day operations. Customers might end up using BizTalk Server Admin Console for some of the activities and Azure Portal for some of the other activities, which is not productive and you are never going to be confident you set up access rights correctly across multiple tools, educating support people how to operate and monitor your solutions.
There are various other challenges like, for example, for Monitoring, you will need an end-to-end monitoring solution that covers both on-prem and cloud, you will also need tracking and analytics solution that will stretch between on-prem and cloud etc. We predict customers might end up building management tools, exactly like what they did 10 years ago for BizTalk solutions. BizTalk360 was born to address the challenge faced by BizTalk Server customers.
Today we are at a juncture where we see the same challenge at a bigger level and BizTalk360 is well positioned to address that challenge since we are already halfway through covering the on-premise solution.
What available and what’s coming in BizTalk360
We realized this situation almost 2 years ago and started expanding BizTalk360 to cover both on-premise and cloud technologies that fall into the Integration bucket with a vision of creating a single unified management and monitoring tool for Microsoft Integration.
Today, BizTalk360, in addition to its full blown support for BizTalk Server, can also manage and monitor related Azure Integration Technologies like
In the upcoming 8.5 version (planned for July 2017), we are bringing in support for Azure Integration Accounts, App Services, and Azure Stream Analytics.
We are also working on a secret project with a bigger vision, which I cannot talk much at this stage (stay tuned).
We will continue our investment in this direction and make BizTalk360 a single must have tool for anyone using Microsoft Technologies for their Integration Requirements.
Author: Saravana Kumar
Saravana Kumar is the Founder and CTO of BizTalk360, an enterprise software that acts as an all-in-one solution for better administration, operation, support and monitoring of Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. View all posts by Saravana Kumar
by Saravana Kumar | May 9, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
About 10-12 years ago (around 2004-2005), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was a big topic in the enterprise world. Massive projects were initiated to align enterprises to be more service oriented with a middleware/ESB platform like BizTalk Server in the middle.
When we talked about SOA implementation using Microsoft technologies during this period, only two technologies/platform stood out –
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
WCF was set of libraries built on top of the .NET Framework that helped to build SOAP based (later REST support was added) web services. WCF was more of a platform that shipped along with the .NET Framework and evolved gradually along with the .NET releases. BizTalk Server, on the other hand, was a full blown Enterprise Server Product that acted as a Middleware platform mainly addressing the challenge of not creating an integration spaghetti between those services (represented as APP in below pictures) created using WCF.
| Without BizTalk Server |
With BizTalk Server |
|
|
BizTalk360 journey between 2011 – 2016
When we started BizTalk360 back in 2010, the objectives were pretty straight forward. Nearly 10,000 medium to large organisations have invested in Microsoft BizTalk Server to address their integration requirements.
We spotted a lot of gaps in BizTalk Server when it comes to BizTalk Server day-to-day administration and monitoring. It looked like a straightforward bet to build a world-class product that can help these 10,000+ customers to improve their operational efficiency.
We started off initially with BizTalk360 as a monitoring solution for BizTalk Server and the product slowly evolved into addressing various operational and analytics needs of the BizTalk Server. There are over 100 features in the product now covering various aspects of day-to-day operational needs like Security, Governance/Auditing, Monitoring, Analytics, Productivity Tools, Knowledge Base, Rich Dashboards, etc. making it a must have add-on product for any Microsoft BizTalk Server customers.
BizTalk360 currently has over 500 enterprise customers, and we are proud to say that Microsoft itself is one of our biggest customers. Microsoft internally uses BizTalk Server for all of their IT and Supply Chain requirements and they rely on BizTalk360 for their day-to-day operations. You can read the case study “Why Microsoft chose BizTalk360 instead of SCOM”
What is the state of Integration today in Microsoft Stack?
In the last 5-6 years, the innovation around technology exploded in all directions. Cloud and mobile became mainstream and companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM pumped a lot of investment into the cloud. On the other hand, SaaS (Software as a Service) based products exploded in other direction. Today, no one really wants to buy off-the-shelf software products, run their own servers and manage upgrades and patches. They simply want to use software or services provided by the third party rather than owning them. About 10-15 years ago, SIEBEL was the leader in CRM space, however, today that segment is ruled by technologies like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Similar story exists in all software segments like Source Control (GIT and Visual Studio Team Service), Productivity Tools (Office365, Google Apps), Email (Office365, Google) etc.
With all these changes, it’s natural for Integration Platforms and Products to evolve as well. The role of integration has become so immense in the last 5 years due to the above mentioned reasons. Today, companies buy/use multiple software products which do one thing really well rather than living with a monolithic beast software which claims to do everything but not good at anything.
This change in attitude also means all these independent software product/services need to talk to each other, which created a new segment of integration products in the likes of IFTTT, Zapier, Azure Logic Apps, SnapLogic, Dell Boomi, etc
Microsoft responded well to this growing challenge in the integration space, addressing the requirements of: Hybrid Integration solutions (the combination of Cloud + On-Premise integrations), Quick & Easy integration solutions, Business Users (aka citizen integrators) integration solutions etc.
If you look at Microsoft Integration Stack today, it’s not just BizTalk Server and WCF anymore. There are at least a dozen products/services that are mainly geared towards Integration in Microsoft Stack.
- Microsoft BizTalk Server
- ASP.NET Web API’s
- Azure Logic Apps
- Azure App Services (Web Jobs)
- Azure Functions (Serverless Compute)
- Azure API Management
- Azure Service Bus (Queues/Topics)
- Azure Stream Analytics
- Azure Event Hubs
- Microsoft PowerApps
- Microsoft Flow
- Azure Gateway (Hybrid Connection)
BizTalk360 – 2017 and beyond
One of the key aspects of a product company like us is that we need to be on the forefront of technology all the time. We need to adapt quickly to the change and understand the fact “change is the only constant”. We cannot just sit back and relax saying BizTalk360 is doing well. We have been closely monitoring the trend what’s going on, what will happen to the existing BizTalk Server customers in the next 10-15 years.
We are fortunate enough to build up a close relationship with Microsoft and the Integration community and are fully aware of the changes that are happening around Integration.
BizTalk360 is now slowly evolving into a product that will cater for the big picture. We wanted to create a single unified tool that will help any customer who invested in Microsoft platform for their integration needs.
We can clearly see the challenges that are building up when you have so many technologies included in a solution. There is no single management tool that will cater for the day-to-day operations. Customers might end up using BizTalk Server Admin Console for some of the activities and Azure Portal for some of the other activities, which is not productive and you are never going to be confident you set up access rights correctly across multiple tools, educating support people how to operate and monitor your solutions.
There are various other challenges like, for example, for Monitoring, you will need an end-to-end monitoring solution that covers both on-prem and cloud, you will also need tracking and analytics solution that will stretch between on-prem and cloud etc. We predict customers might end up building management tools, exactly like what they did 10 years ago for BizTalk solutions. BizTalk360 was born to address the challenge faced by BizTalk Server customers.
Today we are at a juncture where we see the same challenge at a bigger level and BizTalk360 is well positioned to address that challenge since we are already halfway through covering the on-premise solution.
What available and what’s coming in BizTalk360
We realized this situation almost 2 years ago and started expanding BizTalk360 to cover both on-premise and cloud technologies that fall into the Integration bucket with a vision of creating a single unified management and monitoring tool for Microsoft Integration.
Today, BizTalk360, in addition to its full blown support for BizTalk Server, can also manage and monitor related Azure Integration Technologies like
In the upcoming 8.5 version (planned for July 2017), we are bringing in support for Azure Integration Accounts, App Services, and Azure Stream Analytics.
We are also working on a secret project with a bigger vision, which I cannot talk much at this stage (stay tuned).
We will continue our investment in this direction and make BizTalk360 a single must have tool for anyone using Microsoft Technologies for their Integration Requirements.
Author: Saravana Kumar
Saravana Kumar is the Founder and CTO of BizTalk360, an enterprise software that acts as an all-in-one solution for better administration, operation, support and monitoring of Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. View all posts by Saravana Kumar
by Praveena Jayanarayanan | May 8, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Here comes BizTalk360 version 8.4 with a bunch of exciting new features and enhancements as usual. As per the below quotes,
Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development. – David J. Greer
we always listen to the ideas of our customers and implement them for the product development. We make sure their suggestions are addressed and update them in the feedback portal. Based on the priority of the voting by the customers, the features are added to the product in the upcoming releases.
The Monitoring capability is the key feature of BizTalk360. Setting up monitoring is a very easy and quick task with two step process, create an alarm and map the artefact to be monitored. We can configure three different types of alarms namely Threshold, Health check and Data monitoring alarms.
In BizTalk360 v8.4, there are certain enhancements done as part of the alarms. The following are the features as part of the alarm configuration.
- Alarm renaming capability
- Segregation of Data monitoring alarms
- Alarm bulk status update.
In this article, we will have a look into each one of them.
Alarm renaming capability
Prior to v8.4, we cannot rename an alarm and it would be grayed when we edit an alarm. As per the feedback from many of the customers, we have included this ability in our latest release. So now you can rename the alarm as per the business requirement. This renaming applies to Data monitoring alarms also. Once the data monitor alarm is renamed, it will be reflected in the Data monitoring section as well.
With respect to the database changes, earlier, only the Alarm Name was referred in all the places and now AlarmId is being referred everywhere.
Limitation:
- You cannot have same names for two different alarms in the same environment. The alarms can have the same names across the environments.
Segregation of Data Monitoring alarms
In BizTalk360 v7.9 the Data Monitoring functionality was introduced. This also came as a requirement from the customers. It was designed to monitor the data transfer happening in the BizTalk server and trigger alerts based on the conditions set.
In the monitoring home dashboard screen, all the alarms are displayed in a drop down. There might be a chance of unintendingly mapping an artefact to the wrong data monitoring. This confusion can be avoided if the data monitoring alarms are separated from the other alarms. Hence the data monitoring alarms are now segregated and they will be available only in the Data Monitoring section. They will no more be available in the Monitoring home dashboard section and under the Manage Mapping drop-down.
Alarm bulk status update
Under Settings -> Stop alert for maintenance, BizTalk360 has the capability to stop all the alarms from triggering emails. This was as per the feedback from the customer for which we received many votes.
From a business perspective, customers can have created many alarms and a situation might arise that they want to disable certain alarms for maintenance purposes, instead of stopping all of them at once.
In this version of BizTalk360, we can select multiple alarms and enable/disable them at once by clicking on the “Status” button. This is a newly added option for alarm status update. It might look like a small improvement done, but it will be very helpful when doing large implementations and transitions.
What happens during the migration?
Migration scenarios occur when a customer upgrades from a lower version to the latest one. Lot of testing efforts is required to ensure that all the information is retained after migrating from a lower version to higher one. We need to take care that all the data gets migrated without any problem and there is no data loss happening from each of the versions. Also, new changes must get reflected. Extensive testing efforts need to be put to see that this is taken care of and we have assured this.
When the customers migrate from the old versions to the latest one, the ability to edit the alarm name will be shown. The following picture contains some of the migration scenarios that were tested.
One important thing to be noted is the listing of data monitoring alarms. In the older versions, we can see the data monitoring alarms getting listed along with the other types of alarms. Now in the new version, they will get displayed only in the data monitoring section. However, we can edit the names of those alarms in the Manage Alarms page.
Conclusion
Apart from the alarm configuration changes, we have a lot of new features like Logic Apps Data monitoring, IBM MQ monitoring and folder monitoring. We always hear the feedback and suggestions from the customers and try hard to fulfill them to make our product better and at the same time to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.
You can write to us at [email protected]. Have a try at our latest version by downloading a 14-day free trial of BizTalk360.
Author: Praveena Jayanarayanan
I am working as Senior Support Engineer at BizTalk360. I always believe in team work leading to success because “We all cannot do everything or solve every issue. ‘It’s impossible’. However, if we each simply do our part, make our own contribution, regardless of how small we may think it is…. together it adds up and great things get accomplished.” View all posts by Praveena Jayanarayanan
by Praveena Jayanarayanan | May 8, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Here comes BizTalk360 version 8.4 with a bunch of exciting new features and enhancements as usual. As per the below quotes,
Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development. – David J. Greer
we always listen to the ideas of our customers and implement them for the product development. We make sure their suggestions are addressed and update them in the feedback portal. Based on the priority of the voting by the customers, the features are added to the product in the upcoming releases.
The Monitoring capability is the key feature of BizTalk360. Setting up monitoring is a very easy and quick task with two step process, create an alarm and map the artefact to be monitored. We can configure three different types of alarms namely Threshold, Health check and Data monitoring alarms.
In BizTalk360 v8.4, there are certain enhancements done as part of the alarms. The following are the features as part of the alarm configuration.
- Alarm renaming capability
- Segregation of Data monitoring alarms
- Alarm bulk status update.
In this article, we will have a look into each one of them.
Alarm renaming capability
Prior to v8.4, we cannot rename an alarm and it would be grayed when we edit an alarm. As per the feedback from many of the customers, we have included this ability in our latest release. So now you can rename the alarm as per the business requirement. This renaming applies to Data monitoring alarms also. Once the data monitor alarm is renamed, it will be reflected in the Data monitoring section as well.
With respect to the database changes, earlier, only the Alarm Name was referred in all the places and now AlarmId is being referred everywhere.
Limitation:
- You cannot have same names for two different alarms in the same environment. The alarms can have the same names across the environments.
Segregation of Data Monitoring alarms
In BizTalk360 v7.9 the Data Monitoring functionality was introduced. This also came as a requirement from the customers. It was designed to monitor the data transfer happening in the BizTalk server and trigger alerts based on the conditions set.
In the monitoring home dashboard screen, all the alarms are displayed in a drop down. There might be a chance of unintendingly mapping an artefact to the wrong data monitoring. This confusion can be avoided if the data monitoring alarms are separated from the other alarms. Hence the data monitoring alarms are now segregated and they will be available only in the Data Monitoring section. They will no more be available in the Monitoring home dashboard section and under the Manage Mapping drop-down.
Alarm bulk status update
Under Settings -> Stop alert for maintenance, BizTalk360 has the capability to stop all the alarms from triggering emails. This was as per the feedback from the customer for which we received many votes.
From a business perspective, customers can have created many alarms and a situation might arise that they want to disable certain alarms for maintenance purposes, instead of stopping all of them at once.
In this version of BizTalk360, we can select multiple alarms and enable/disable them at once by clicking on the “Status” button. This is a newly added option for alarm status update. It might look like a small improvement done, but it will be very helpful when doing large implementations and transitions.
What happens during the migration?
Migration scenarios occur when a customer upgrades from a lower version to the latest one. Lot of testing efforts is required to ensure that all the information is retained after migrating from a lower version to higher one. We need to take care that all the data gets migrated without any problem and there is no data loss happening from each of the versions. Also, new changes must get reflected. Extensive testing efforts need to be put to see that this is taken care of and we have assured this.
When the customers migrate from the old versions to the latest one, the ability to edit the alarm name will be shown. The following picture contains some of the migration scenarios that were tested.
One important thing to be noted is the listing of data monitoring alarms. In the older versions, we can see the data monitoring alarms getting listed along with the other types of alarms. Now in the new version, they will get displayed only in the data monitoring section. However, we can edit the names of those alarms in the Manage Alarms page.
Conclusion
Apart from the alarm configuration changes, we have a lot of new features like Logic Apps Data monitoring, IBM MQ monitoring and folder monitoring. We always hear the feedback and suggestions from the customers and try hard to fulfill them to make our product better and at the same time to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.
You can write to us at [email protected]. Have a try at our latest version by downloading a 14-day free trial of BizTalk360.
Author: Praveena Jayanarayanan
I am working as Senior Support Engineer at BizTalk360. I always believe in team work leading to success because “We all cannot do everything or solve every issue. ‘It’s impossible’. However, if we each simply do our part, make our own contribution, regardless of how small we may think it is…. together it adds up and great things get accomplished.” View all posts by Praveena Jayanarayanan
by Praveena Jayanarayanan | May 8, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Here comes BizTalk360 version 8.4 with a bunch of exciting new features and enhancements as usual. As per the below quotes,
Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development. – David J. Greer
we always listen to the ideas of our customers and implement them for the product development. We make sure their suggestions are addressed and update them in the feedback portal. Based on the priority of the voting by the customers, the features are added to the product in the upcoming releases.
The Monitoring capability is the key feature of BizTalk360. Setting up monitoring is a very easy and quick task with two step process, create an alarm and map the artefact to be monitored. We can configure three different types of alarms namely Threshold, Health check and Data monitoring alarms.
In BizTalk360 v8.4, there are certain enhancements done as part of the alarms. The following are the features as part of the alarm configuration.
- Alarm renaming capability
- Segregation of Data monitoring alarms
- Alarm bulk status update.
In this article, we will have a look into each one of them.
Alarm renaming capability
Prior to v8.4, we cannot rename an alarm and it would be grayed when we edit an alarm. As per the feedback from many of the customers, we have included this ability in our latest release. So now you can rename the alarm as per the business requirement. This renaming applies to Data monitoring alarms also. Once the data monitor alarm is renamed, it will be reflected in the Data monitoring section as well.
With respect to the database changes, earlier, only the Alarm Name was referred in all the places and now AlarmId is being referred everywhere.
Limitation:
- You cannot have same names for two different alarms in the same environment. The alarms can have the same names across the environments.
Segregation of Data Monitoring alarms
In BizTalk360 v7.9 the Data Monitoring functionality was introduced. This also came as a requirement from the customers. It was designed to monitor the data transfer happening in the BizTalk server and trigger alerts based on the conditions set.
In the monitoring home dashboard screen, all the alarms are displayed in a drop down. There might be a chance of unintendingly mapping an artefact to the wrong data monitoring. This confusion can be avoided if the data monitoring alarms are separated from the other alarms. Hence the data monitoring alarms are now segregated and they will be available only in the Data Monitoring section. They will no more be available in the Monitoring home dashboard section and under the Manage Mapping drop-down.
Alarm bulk status update
Under Settings -> Stop alert for maintenance, BizTalk360 has the capability to stop all the alarms from triggering emails. This was as per the feedback from the customer for which we received many votes.
From a business perspective, customers can have created many alarms and a situation might arise that they want to disable certain alarms for maintenance purposes, instead of stopping all of them at once.
In this version of BizTalk360, we can select multiple alarms and enable/disable them at once by clicking on the “Status” button. This is a newly added option for alarm status update. It might look like a small improvement done, but it will be very helpful when doing large implementations and transitions.
What happens during the migration?
Migration scenarios occur when a customer upgrades from a lower version to the latest one. Lot of testing efforts is required to ensure that all the information is retained after migrating from a lower version to higher one. We need to take care that all the data gets migrated without any problem and there is no data loss happening from each of the versions. Also, new changes must get reflected. Extensive testing efforts need to be put to see that this is taken care of and we have assured this.
When the customers migrate from the old versions to the latest one, the ability to edit the alarm name will be shown. The following picture contains some of the migration scenarios that were tested.
One important thing to be noted is the listing of data monitoring alarms. In the older versions, we can see the data monitoring alarms getting listed along with the other types of alarms. Now in the new version, they will get displayed only in the data monitoring section. However, we can edit the names of those alarms in the Manage Alarms page.
Conclusion
Apart from the alarm configuration changes, we have a lot of new features like Logic Apps Data monitoring, IBM MQ monitoring and folder monitoring. We always hear the feedback and suggestions from the customers and try hard to fulfill them to make our product better and at the same time to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.
You can write to us at [email protected]. Have a try at our latest version by downloading a 14-day free trial of BizTalk360.
Author: Praveena Jayanarayanan
I am working as Senior Support Engineer at BizTalk360. I always believe in team work leading to success because “We all cannot do everything or solve every issue. ‘It’s impossible’. However, if we each simply do our part, make our own contribution, regardless of how small we may think it is…. together it adds up and great things get accomplished.” View all posts by Praveena Jayanarayanan
by Saravana Kumar | May 3, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We are continuing our tradition of one new release every 3-4 months once continuously for the past 6 years. In every release, we wanted to make sure we add 5-6 meaningful features that will help BizTalk Server administrators with Operations, Monitoring and Analytics capabilities. In BizTalk360 version 8.4, we added some exciting new features.
- BizTalk Server Licensing Widget
- Data Monitoring for Azure Logic Apps
- Folder Monitoring
- FTP/FTPS/SFTP Monitoring
- IBM MQ Monitoring
- BizTalk Health Monitoring (BHM) Integration
- Manage NT Services directly in the Web Console
- Manage SQL Jobs directly in the Web Console
- Few enhancements/bug fixes
BizTalk Server Licensing Widget
From our experience dealing with 100’s of BizTalk Server customers, we noticed that a lot of them struggle to understand how many BizTalk Server licenses are required for their servers. About 4 years ago I wrote an article called Understanding BizTalk Server Licensing and that’s one of the popular articles on our blog. We just thought it will be a good idea to transform that knowledge into a small widget in BizTalk360 so that people will easily understand how many licenses are required for your BizTalk Server.
Out of the box we ship this new widget in BizTalk360 version 8.4 called “BizTalk Server License” as shown below. This widget will display key information like BizTalk edition, server type, processor type, number of cores, processor manufacturer, retail license cost per server, how many servers to be licensed and total cost for the environment.
Data Monitoring for Azure Logic Apps
Data monitoring in BizTalk360 is one of the key capabilities that allows you to monitor and trigger alerts based on historical events. Some of the common use cases of data monitoring include “No Event Alerting”. Ex: If you are expected to process 5 purchase orders from an FTP location every hour and you haven’t received the expected volume, then BizTalk360 can alert you with a message.
We are taking the exact same concept to Azure Logic Apps to alert you based on historical transactions within a time window.
There are various interesting use cases. For example, as shown above, you may want to get alerted if one of your Logic App has gone crazy and firing thousands of executions and costing so many $$$. We will cover in detail about this feature in a separate blog article.
Here is the detailed list of metrics you can set data monitoring on.
Folder Monitoring
Sometimes as the product matures and you look at adding more features, you tend to miss out on the basic things. Folder monitoring is one such thing we left for so long! It’s better late than never. In BizTalk360 version 8.4 we are bringing the capability of folder monitoring. The technology might have improved significantly like Micro Services, REST API’s etc, however, file based integration is there to stay. It’s very common in the integration world where you drop a file (purchase order, batch file, EDI transactions etc) and the integration kicks in. One of the common challenges in such integration is that what happens when the integration is broken and the files started to pile up in the pickup folder.
We solve the exact problem using the folder monitoring capability.
One of the core values of BizTalk360 is to make monitoring configuration seamless and that’s how we differentiate ourselves from general purpose monitoring products. In the folder monitoring case, we automatically list down all the receive locations and send ports that use BizTalk FILE adapter and allow the user to configure in pretty much 2-3 clicks, we pick up all the values like folder location from existing configuration as shown above.
FTP/FTPS/SFTP
On the similar lines of normal Folder monitoring, FTP based integrations are key in most of the enterprise integration scenarios. BizTalk Server comes with three different adapters FTP, FTPs and SFTP to tackle FTP scenarios where the variations are mainly around the security capabilities of the FTP server.
With BizTalk360 version 8.4, you can monitor FTP locations for data pile up. We put a lot of efforts to make the configuration experience as seamless as possible, the screens will automatically list all the FTP based send ports/receive locations and all the available values like location, username etc are automatically picked up from those configurations.
IBM MQ Monitoring
For the past few releases, we are slowly bringing in the capability of Queue monitoring into BizTalk360. Queues play a vital role in enterprise integration especially for robustness, store, and forward patterns. In the previous releases, we introduced MSMQ and Azure Service Bus Queue. In BizTalk360 version 8.4, we are bringing in support for IBM MQ. We support both MQSC and MQS based configurations.
In any IBM MQ queues, you can monitor for the following 4 parameters – queue depth, backout queue depth, queue usage % and backout queue usage %.
BizTalk Health Monitoring Integration
For many years, we had support for Message Box Viewer inside BizTalk360. We periodically run MBV in configured environments, parse and store the result and display it in the BizTalk360 web console. We also got the ability to monitor and alert users based on Message Box Viewer raised errors and warning. Two years ago, Microsoft made some major changes to Message Box Viewer, re-branded it as BizTalk Health Monitor with few additional functionalities and deprecated MBV.
Support for BHM is one of the top requested features on our feedback portal. In BizTalk360 version 8.4 we introduced support for BHM and deprecated MBV support.
NT Services Operation in BizTalk and SQL Servers
One of the main objective for us from the security perspective is to stop people logging on/off into production BizTalk and SQL servers during business hours. We also wanted to audit any activities performed by BizTalk support people. Even though you shouldn’t start/stop services in your environment, we noticed in some cases NT services like world wide web, enterprise single sign on, BizTalk host instances, SQL Agent, etc needs to be started/stopped for the variety of reasons. Currently, users will RDP or have remote MMC snap-in to manage NT services in BizTalk and SQL servers. With BizTalk360 version 8.4 you can manage them directly in the web console. In addition, the activities will be audited by BizTalk360.
Manage SQL Jobs Operation from web console
In a similar concept to managing NT Services in both BizTalk and SQL Servers, SQL jobs play a vital role in a BizTalk Server environment. SQL Jobs are responsible for keeping your BizTalk environment healthy. They take care of routine housekeeping activities like moving data from Message Box database to Tracking database, purging/archiving tracked data, backup/disaster log shipping etc.
In BizTalk360 version 8.4, we brought in capabilities to manage SQL jobs directly from the web console. This functionality of monitoring SQL Jobs has been in the product for a very long time.
Few Enhancements and Bug Fixes
This article mainly covers all the new and exciting features we shipped in BizTalk360 version 8.4. In every release, we also allocate time to enhance current features and to address any top priority bugs we received from our existing customers. Here are some of the key enhancements and bug fixes
Alarm Management Improvements: Now you have the ability to bulk enable/disable monitoring alarms. You can also rename the alarms (again, one of the most requested features on our feedback portal.)
Webhook Notification Channel: Now you have the ability to specify (override) a new endpoint URL at the alarm level.
Logic Apps Monitoring Performance Improvement: Few critical updates been made to improve the performance of monitoring Azure Logic Apps
Get started today
Author: Saravana Kumar
Saravana Kumar is the Founder and CTO of BizTalk360, an enterprise software that acts as an all-in-one solution for better administration, operation, support and monitoring of Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. View all posts by Saravana Kumar
