by Rochelle Saldanha | Nov 6, 2018 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Continuing in our series of blogs, Customer feedback getting Answered, where we will be trying to address and answer some of the issues, where a workaround is possible, rather than awaiting a new feature release.
Today we will address an issue relating to BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM) integration in BizTalk360.
Issue at hand
One of our existing customers posted the following feedback request: http://feedback.biztalk360.com/forums/331695-biztalk360-operations/suggestions/20567692-bhm-bt360-profile-use-monitoring-profile
He wanted to specify or change the BHM Monitoring Profile that BizTalk360 should use.
Monitoring Profile in BHM
The BizTalk snap-in, “BizTalk Health Monitor” (aka “BHM”), has so been created to help you easily monitor the health of your BizTalk environment. BHM is based on the same engine as MBV. This snap-in can be added to the existing BizTalk Administration Console or can be run individually in its own MMC window.
A Monitoring profile is in fact a BHM profile, but configured specifically to execute a short selection of critical BHM queries/rules and custom rules checking the state of given ports, orchestrations, host instances, queues and BizTalk databases sizes and raise critical warnings detected in a log.
Current Working of BizTalk360 integrated BHM
The BizTalk360 product integrates with BHM, but currently has the limitation that you cannot specify a profile, that is stored in BHM, which should be scheduled and run at those specific times.
Solution Workaround
If you wish for BizTalk360 to run a certain BHM profile – Follow the below workaround.

- Save the Profile. This will automatically save a copy in the folder – C:ProgramDataMicrosoftBizTalkHealthMonitor with the name MBVSETTINGS_.xml
- Now you need to copy this XML file and paste it in the BizTalk360 folder – C:Program Files (x86)Kovai LtdBizTalk360Service.
- Delete the existing MBVSETTINGS.xml and rename the copied file to MBVSETTINGS.xml
Now BizTalk360 has been setup to pick that Profile to execute in it’s scheduled runs. Then, the next time you hit -> ‘Run BHM now‘, or BizTalk360 scheduled runs for BHM start, BizTalk360 will pick that profile and run the rules for it.
Hope you found this workaround helpful.
Thanks to our customer Joost for his help in the investigation.
Author: Rochelle Saldanha
Rochelle Saldanha is currently working in the Customer Support & Client Relationship Teams at BizTalk360. She loves travelling and watching movies. View all posts by Rochelle Saldanha
by Rochelle Saldanha | Sep 11, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We are planning a series of blogs, Customer feedback getting Answered, where we will be trying to address and answer some of the issues where a workaround is possible rather than awaiting a new feature release.
Many of our customers put a lot of effort in describing their problems in the feedback portal – (where we collect all requirements in single place and we pick the popular features to be implemented based on the voting done by various customers). We often go through the feature requests – updating the status of the issues and also discussing them with our technical development team of the feasibility of implementing them.
Behind the scenes, we go through a process for the popular requests and help to bring them to implementation in the upcoming releases.
In one of our previous blogs, I went through the FAQ’s a lot of our customers usually have. In this article, I take an issue from the feedback portal and show how it can be solved with the API we expose.
The Issue:
Monitoring Alarms information on the Operations Dashboard
The Operations Dashboard is widely used by a lot of companies to have a quick overview of the system. While we do have a lot of interesting widgets, we do not have anything which links the Alarm notification section to this area.
http://feedback.biztalk360.com/forums/331698-biztalk360-monitoring/suggestions/20369500-widget-with-errors
With API Documentation capability of BizTalk360, we have exposed over 350 REST services (APIs) that have the capability to retrieve the requested information from the BizTalk server environment. The APIs are defined as Swagger files which mean that you have the ability to execute them online to see if the result is what is intended. For example, you may want to display the list of BizTalk Applications or the performance of the BizTalk server (such as CPU, Memory, etc.) in a custom dashboard application within your organization. With BizTalk360 API Documentation, it is very easy for you to consume the API and retrieve the information from the BizTalk server environment. It not only ends with these. You can access pretty much any information like EDI, BAM, Artifact information, and so on from the BizTalk environment with the help of BizTalk360 APIs.
The Solution:
I have used for this example, a very simple API to retrieve the latest monitoring data for a specific alarm from the below API.
GET Services. REST/AlertService. svc/GetLatestMonitoringData
You can use the BizTalk360 API documentation to test your parameters and then view the output response.
In BizTalk360, navigate to Settings -> API documentation -> Select Alert services from the dropdown and then select GetLatestMonitoringData.

Current Alarm Monitoring Dashboard View
This is how my Alarms current state is in the Monitoring dashboard is currently.

And now to view the same data in the Operations Dashboard, we need to create a custom widget which will use the API call as shown earlier. All you need to provide is the <Environment ID> & <Alarm Id> to pass as parameters which you can retrieve from the SQL tables. (Environment ID is provided at the top of the API Documentation page already)
Then you can use this code for the widget which I wrote to have a basic widget for a specific alarm to show on the Operations Dashboard.

Thus, you can see for the Alarm – Demo Alarm, I have displayed all the artifacts and the state they are in.
This can be crucial for those who use their dashboards a lot. Rather than switch to the Monitoring dashboard, you can view the same data as a widget on the Operations Dashboard, along with other useful information.
Hopefully, this blog gave you some more ideas on how you can use the API & Custom widgets to customise the data displayed.
If you have any questions, contact us at [email protected]. Also, feel free to leave your feedback in our forum.
Author: Rochelle Saldanha
Rochelle Saldanha is currently working in the Customer Support & Client Relationship Teams at BizTalk360. She loves travelling and watching movies. View all posts by Rochelle Saldanha