BizTalk360 V9.1 – New Features and Enhancements

by Saranya Ramakrishnan | Apr 21, 2020 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

As you know BizTalk360 keeps up its standard by introducing new features or by improving existing features, that ease the user experience to the next level in every single release. We are delighted to inform you that the next version of BizTalk360 V9.1 will be released for production use within a couple of days!

New Features Introduced in BizTalk360 V9.1

Clustered NT Service Monitoring

BizTalk360 is already capable of monitoring clustered BizTalk and SQL Server resources such as Disks, System Resources, Event Logs, and NT Services. In the case of the failover scenario, the BizTalk360 monitoring service will automatically take the active server for monitoring.    

From this version on, the user can monitor clustered NT Services by setting up the expected state of the clustered service as ‘At least One Active’.

Consider a scenario where you have a clustered BizTalk environment, in which your Enterprise Single sign-on service is configured as Generic Type, i.e the SSO service is clustered, and you want to ensure that the SSO service should up and running in at least one of the clustered nodes.  This can be easily achieved through BizTalk360 NT service monitoring.

With this feature, you can monitor the state of your NT services in your BizTalk or SQL servers by configuring the Expected state as Started or Stopped. The clustered NT service can be monitored by configuring the expected state as “Atleast One Active”. The BizTalk360 monitoring service will ensure that the configured service is always up and running in any of the respective clustered nodes.  An alert will get triggered to the configured email-Id when the service goes down in all the nodes.

NOTE: For better understanding, the clustered nodes are grouped with similar colour code.

The user can also set up AutoCorrect for this. In this case, when the SSO service goes down in both the clustered nodes, then the BizTalk360 monitoring service will automatically try to start the service in any of the nodes. With this, you can ensure that there is no downtime in the service. 

Recurrence Scheduled Maintenance

The latest version of BizTalk360 will hold the enriched form of Stop alerts for maintenance, which is renamed as “Scheduled Maintenance”. Schedules can be configured to stop monitoring immediately or at a later point in time, based on your maintenance plan.

Immediate Maintenance

You can set up the maintenance immediately from the current time by enabling the ‘Immediate’ option and providing the maintenance End Date and Time in the schedule configuration.

Future Maintenance

Configure the schedule with Start and End Date/Time to stop monitoring during the future maintenance period. A future maintenance schedule can be configured for both once or recurrence execution.

1. One Time Execution – You can create a One Time Schedule, if you want to stop the monitoring during, for example, the deployment of BizTalk applications, which has been planned only once in the future date, i.e on June 1st from 9 AM to 11 AM.

   

2. Recurrence Execution – The schedule will be created once and can be executed multiple times based on the recurrence pattern daily, weekly, monthly, i.e daily 10-11 PM, alternate weekends, 4th Wednesday of every month, etc.

The user can now also edit the schedule and manually stop the maintenance in between, i.e. before the maintenance period gets over. So, it is not required to wait until the end of the configured maintenance cycle.

Schedule actions such as create, delete, modify, stop maintenance are audited for further reference.

Monitoring Improvements

Web Endpoint Monitoring

Monitoring Status Enabled/Disabled is introduced in Web Endpoint monitoring. This enables the user to define when BizTalk360 should start/stop monitoring the configured Web Endpoint.

For instance, you may configure multiple Web Endpoints, but you temporarily don’t want to monitor all the endpoints. In this case, you can set the monitor status as Disabled for those endpoints.

BizTalk360 will start to monitor the configured Web Endpoints only if the status is set as Enabled.

Clone Alarm

Users can now easily copy all the artifacts mapped for monitoring and the data monitoring configurations from one alarm to another. With the Clone alarm feature, users can copy both the alarm configurations and all the artifacts mapping configurations.

MSMQ Age Monitoring

With this enhancement, the user can monitor the oldest message in an MSMQ queue by using the threshold parameter ‘Message Age’. This threshold parameter is added to monitor and alert the oldest message in MSMQ, based on the configured message age units’ Days/hours/minutes.

Mapped Artifacts  

All the artifacts that have been configured for monitoring under a particular alarm are listed in the Manage Mapping section in Monitoring Dashboard.

SMTP Notification Channel  

The user can define for which error type(s) notifications should be sent through SMTP notification channels, i.e. only in case of Error & Warning or Error/Warning/Healthy state of the artifacts.

Rename Data Monitoring Schedule

The created Data Monitoring schedule can be edited and renamed at a later point in time. Also, users are restricted to create a duplicate schedule for the same alarm under the same monitor type.

Analytics Improvements

SQL Server Performance Widget

Widget to show the SQL server performance (CPU & Memory Usage) is added in the Analytics dashboard.

Reassociate the SQL Query

In the Reporting section, the Secure SQL Query widget can be edited and re-associated to any configured Secure SQL Query.

Event Log Data Collection Optimization

In earlier versions, the Advanced Event Viewer feature collected all the Event log entries for the configured Event Logs and Event Log Sources, but irrespective of error levels. From this version on, to avoid data growth, the user can (de)select the error levels (Information, Warning, Error, etc ) which should be collected. This way, BizTalk360 will start collecting event logs based on the selected error levels.

View MDN Message in EDI AS2

EDI AS2/MDN message content can be viewed as an encoded and wired format.

BizTalk Server 2020 Compatibility

We are proud to share that BizTalk360 is now compatible with BizTalk Server 2020!

Group Properties

Under BizTalk Group properties, users can view newly added properties in BizTalk Server 2020. 

• Receive Location (Fault Tolerance)
• Audit Log Operation

Receive Location Advanced Schedule Configuration

The recurrence schedule configured in BizTalk Server 2020 receive locations can now be viewed in BizTalk360.

Conclusion

Considering the feedback from our customers, BizTalk360 will continue to provide more useful features. Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes only 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. 

The post BizTalk360 V9.1 – New Features and Enhancements appeared first on BizTalk360.

BizTalk360 V9.0.3 New Features and Enhancements Summary

by Saranya Ramakrishnan | Dec 27, 2019 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

It’s time to upgrade your BizTalk360 installation! We are here with our next release of BizTalk360 V.9.0.3. 

A brief summary of new features we introduced in V9.0.3

Database Size Monitoring

Database Size monitoring helps to monitor the Data and log file size of the BizTalk and BizTalk360 databases, by simply configuring the error and warning threshold values for the database and log file sizes.

Below are the BizTalk databases that can be monitor using BizTalk360:

• BizTalkDTADb
• BizTalkMgmtDb
• BizTalkMsgBoxDb
• BizTalkRuleEngineDb
• BAM databases (BAMPrimaryImport, BAMAlertsApplication, BAMArchive, BAMStarSchema)
• SSODB

Analytics Custom Widget Reporting

By using the BizTalk360 Reporting Custom widget, you can retrieve performance metrics of the BizTalk environment such as Messaging Performance, Message Transmission failure rate, Server performance, etc., as a report. Based on the configured schedule you can receive that report in your email box.

Configurable Polling interval for monitoring

By default, the BizTalk360 monitoring service checks the status of all configured artifacts every 1 min. However, BizTalk360 provides an option for the user to configure the polling interval. Based on the configured polling interval, the monitoring service will determine the monitor status of the endpoints.

Migration Scenario – After migration, the default polling interval 1 min will be set to all the Endpoints. This can be modified as per your requirements.

SQL Server Cluster Monitoring

we extend our support to monitor the SQL Server cluster. Cluster SQL Server can be monitored by configuring the SQL Server Network name. BizTalk360 will start monitoring the currently active node. In case of a failover, BizTalk360 will automatically take the active server for monitoring.

The following resources can be monitored by configuring the SQL Server:

• CPU & Memory
• NT Services
• Disks (available disk space)
• Event Logs

Subscriptions (Message Box)

In addition, to retrieve the service instance and message details, BizTalk360 allows users to execute queries to retrieve the details of the subscription from the message box database. The subscription details such as Name, Service Name, state, subscription type, service instance id will be retrieved on message box query execution.

Look at this blog article to see the benefits of the above features in detail.

Let’s jump into the feature improvements in detail

SQL Authentication Support

BizTalk360 allows users to view and monitor the SQL Query results by using Secure SQL Query and database query monitoring functionality. In Which BizTalk360 executes the Query by connecting to the server against windows system users (using windows authentication mode).

But shared server can have multiple users having access to different instances and Databases. So, to support this, we have improved these functionalities by supporting SQL Authentication mode, With this user can connect to the database with the relevant user credentials.  From this version on, you can also query your Azure databases.

Dashboard Improvements

The dashboard is one of the key functionalities where customers would be using more often on a day-day basis. So, we have considered improving the dashboard frequently based on customer feedback.

BizTalk360 Monitoring Dashboard improvements

1. Indication of alarm status (Enabled/Disabled)
2. Number of Alerts Notified (2/3)
3. The artifacts from the collapsed view are now clickable to route to the respective mapping section

BizTalk Group Dashboard improvements

BizTalk group dashboard in BizTalk360 gives the consolidated view of all the artifacts mapped to all the alarms in an environment.

From this version on, we allow the user to configure the BizTalk group dashboard based on their needs. Users can choose the artifacts types (Application, Servers, Queues, Folder Monitoring, etc . ) that they want to look into the dashboard. So that BizTalk360 monitoring service will fetch the status of only the chosen artifacts type on every cycle, rather looking for all the artifacts. In this way, we have improved the performance of the monitoring service. Also, you can Enable or Disable the BizTalk Group dashboard at any point in time.

Migration Scenario – After migration, the BizTalk Group Dashboard will be in enable mode, with all the artifacts type chosen. After which you can reconfigure this as per your requirement.

Tracking (DTA) Performance Data Collection Optimisation

In the earlier version, Users can enable tracking data collection for various metrics type, say  Failure/Success rate for Port, Schema, Messaging Performance for the port , schema, orchestration, etc, where BizTalk360 will start collecting data for all the metrics of the selected type. From this version on, to improve the performance, we allow users to choose the relevant DTA metrics, which will reduce the number of calls to the DTA database.

Users can choose the DTA metrics at the environment level in a well-ordered tree view diagram.

Migration Scenario –If you enabled Tracking (DTA) Performance Data Collection then after migration all DTA metrics under the selected type will be enabled. This can be modified as per your requirements.

Logic App

With the rise of Hybrid integration solutions, the job of BizTalk administrators has extended to the (Azure) cloud. BizTalk360 helps these administrators by providing operational and monitoring support for Logic Apps and  API Apps, thereby admin need not check the Azure portal to know the health of these services,  where they can easily operate and monitor from BizTalk360.

However, in the earlier version of BizTalk360, we allow all the users to manage all the LogicApps there is no access restriction. We have improved this in this release where admin can define which user can manage (enable, disable, delete, trigger) the Logic Apps based on the role.

In addition to this, we have introduced the filter option to filter the logic apps under different subscriptions.

Quick Alarm

With the quick alarm, you can select the application artifacts that you want to monitor, BizTalk360 will automatically map that artifacts for monitoring.

Notification Channel

Now you can define the error type i.e. only error & warning or error/warning/healthy of the artifacts to get notified in the notification channels(slack, Service Now, Webhook).

Place Holder Encryption

Place holders can be used in the custom widgets. To tighten the security now all the placeholder values configured in custom widgets will get encrypted. For the existing placeholder, values will get encrypted automatically once you upgraded to the latest version.

Service Instance operations 

From this version on, we allow the user to enter the reason in the comment section (optional) for all the service instance operations (Resume/Suspend/Terminate). The same will get audited for reference.

SFTP

All the file mask patterns supported in BizTalk server will now support in BizTalk360

Conclusion

Considering the feedback from our customers, BizTalk360 will continue to provide more useful features.

Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes only 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. 

The post BizTalk360 V9.0.3 New Features and Enhancements Summary appeared first on BizTalk360.