by Mekala Ramesh | Jan 3, 2019 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
BizTalk360 team Wishes you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
In 2018, we have released 3 major versions of BizTalk360 with various new capabilities, enhancements and bug fixes. In this blog post, we wanted to summarize the best 10 features released.
1. Import & Export
All the newly created BizTalk Server applications are being tested first in the preproduction or UAT and shadow environments to avoid business consequences. Likewise, customers would prefer to test all the functionalities of their BizTalk360 configuration in their non-production environments. Further, they populate necessary data to operate, monitor and find analytical information of their environment. Admins don’t need to recreate their BizTalk360 configuration again in their production environment as in these situations, our import and export capability plays a major role. We have enhanced the existing functionality for users to be able to export:
1. User Access Policies
2. Saved queries
3. Secure SQL queries (along with their configurations)
4. Knowledge Base articles
5. BizTalk reports
6. Dashboards and Custom Widgets (along with their configurations)
from one environment (QA/Development/UAT) and import them as is into another environment (i.e., Production). Users can also change the configurations while importing into the destination environment.
2. Advanced web endpoint monitoring
In a BizTalk environment, the health of Web Endpoints is vital to be able to process the data between multiple applications/partners. BizTalk Administrators might manually monitor the health and results of web endpoints in every execution, but this is a cumbersome process. BizTalk360 provides the capability to monitor such Web Endpoints. This monitoring capability is extended to support other different authentications.
Basic
In the context of the HTTP transaction, there might be a scenario to authenticate the web endpoint using the Basic Authentication method (User Name, Password). BizTalk360 has this capability to monitor the Web endpoints using Basic Authentication.
Certificate Authentication
As like basic authentication, some HTTP web endpoints require a SSL certificate for the communication. To support this kind of scenarios, we have introduced a new option to provide client certificate thumbprint in the web endpoint monitoring section.
Azure Services Authentication
To provide extended support to monitor Azure services web endpoints, we have enabled the Azure services authentication mechanism in Web endpoint monitoring section. Once the Azure service principal is configured in Azure, information like Tenant Id, Client Id and Secret key need to be provided for monitoring.
3. Business Holiday Calendar
BizTalk360 provides this new capability to configure the business holidays in a calendar. These business holiday calendars can be mapped during maintenance window setup. This new configuration section is introduced in the Monitoring Notification settings section as “Configure Business Holidays”.
Using this intuitive UI, users can configure the business holidays in a calendar and save it for further mapping during the maintenance setup process.
4. User Access Policy – Multiple options for providing access to BizTalk applications
In earlier versions, it was a simple grid displaying all the available applications in a BizTalk environment, and you can select the applications to provide access to Normal Users/Groups. But now we have modified this, to provide multiple options for providing access to the applications. This would surely be more user-friendly and of course, meet the requirements. The different options include:
Grant Access by Applications
By enabling this option, the user has access to all the currently configured applications. Once this option is enabled for any profiles, that user doesn’t have access to the newly integrated applications in your BizTalk Server.
Grant Access to all Applications
As the name denotes, enabling this rule will provide access to all the available applications for the Normal Users/Groups. This will be similar to the permissions of the Super User who will have access to all currently deployed and newly added applications.
Wildcard Search
The user can select the required option and provide the search value. Once this rule has been configured, the user will have access to all the applications matching this wildcard. Also, the user will automatically be given access to the newly created applications that match the wildcard.
Grant Access to Application Groups
With this new capability, you can create Application Groups and map BizTalk applications to that group. Once the user is given access to the Application group, he/she can access all the applications mapped to that group.
5. PowerShell Notification Channel
Besides the already available notification channel features, BizTalk360 supports integration with PowerShell scripts. This new capability enables the user to perform some tasks via a PowerShell script, each time the alarm was triggered.
It only takes a few steps to use the PowerShell Notification channel:
– Create the PowerShell script
– Configuring the PowerShell Notification Channel in BizTalk360
6. Grid Column customization
Grid columns can be dynamically removed or added based on the user preference. As per the settings in the configuration section, columns will be aligned and displayed in the grid view. These customized column settings can be saved for future reference as well. We are sure this capability will add more value when the administrator is looking for the instances/messages based on various conditions.
As an initial phase, this implementation has been done in the following areas in BizTalk360:
1. Message Box Queries
2. Graphical Flow (Tracking)
3. Electronic Data Interchange
7. Pagination for improved performance
We have optimized the grids by providing you the power of pagination. We have implemented pagination for each grid available in BizTalk360. It is an easy and standard practice that prevents you from having to load the entire result set all at once. The grid supports both preloaded and dynamically loaded data. By using pagination, the rows in the grid gets dynamically separated into pages. The grid will automatically display default rows in each page. The user can increase the maximum number of result rows by selecting the Max Match size in the drop down.
8. Grid Column Filtering
All the grid columns in BizTalk360 have got a new makeover. In a high-volume data store scenario, there will always be challenges to quickly filter and retrieve the desired data. To simplify the data retrieval process, we have implemented 4 types of filters in BizTalk360.
Text Filter
Text filter is the default filter. Using a text filter, you can filter the text input. The text filter is already implemented in BizTalk360 in various sections. The user should enter the text in the filter text box to retrieve the desired data set.
Checklist Filter
Using this filtering type, the grid shows a checkbox list with the set of predefined values. The user can select one or more of the values and apply the filtering. The types are status, Boolean & Date Time filter.
Status Filter
A Status filter allows filtering the different status in the column. For some filter conditions, some predefined values will be shown in the drop down for the data retrieval. The user can retrieve the data based on the available status. For example, a BizTalk application has different statuses, like Started, Stopped and Partially started.
Boolean Filter
This kind of filter is used to fetch the value based on true or false conditions. Say for example, in the Search Artifacts section we have a checkbox column to check for the receive port, if it’s a two-way port or not. Using the Boolean filter for this column, the user can filter for the two-way receive location.
9. Stop Alerts for maintenance Improvements
During a maintenance window, no notification was shown in the UI. This is enhanced now, and a notification will be shown in the Operations dashboard and Alert Maintenance section. We have added the capability to allow the users to set up multiple (future) maintenance windows. Additional to this, historical maintenance schedules are preserved for auditing purposes along with periodic purging capability.
10. Triggering alert emails to admin users
Alert Notification will be sent to the admin users in case there is some monitor error. Admin users can be configured in the system alert settings section.
Installer Improvements
Installer Logging capability
We have enabled a logging capability in the installer. This will help the users and support engineers to identify the root cause in case of any issues during the installation process.
Installer One Password Capability
We have enhanced the BizTalk360 installer, where only one set of credentials (UserName, Password) will be asked during the upgrade process, in case the same credentials have been used for all the installed components.
Installer SQL Upgrade
There was no support for the SQL authentication upgrade. We have enhanced the installer logic to support SQL Authentication upgrade.
Persist Web.config file changes during the upgrade
To access BizTalk360 via the HTTPS protocol, few configurations need to be done in the web.config file. In earlier versions, during the upgrade process, this configuration is overridden, and the user needs to do the configuration every time. This has been enhanced, and changes which are made in the config file are persisted during the upgrade process.
Conclusion
I must say 2018 was a fantastic year for us, where we focused on improving the product with exciting new features, enhancements and fixing support cases. Along with the above new capabilities, we have provided a fix for 209 support cases and enhanced 24 existing features.
We are looking forward, 2019 would be another great successful year for us with more exciting new features added to the product.
Author: Mekala Ramesh
Lead QA & Product Support at BizTalk360 – Having around 8 years of experience in software testing & customer support field with the strong knowledge in SDLC and STLC phases. Specialized in various types of testing methodologies. Passionate tester, who always want to deliver the software product with the best quality to the end customers. Possess strong knowledge, to establish the testing process from scratch. Playing a pivotal role in BizTalk360 is making me deliver the product to every customer in a delicious way. View all posts by Mekala Ramesh
by Mekala Ramesh | Sep 12, 2018 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Introduction
We are super excited to announce the availability of another interesting improvement in our upcoming version! BizTalk360 will allow you to setup monitoring maintenance, based on the business holidays configured for the environment.
Sometimes, administrators setup the maintenance period during new deployments or installation of security patches in their BizTalk environment. In such situations, to temporarily stop the monitoring in BizTalk360, there is a feature available “Stop Alerts for Maintenance”. Using this capability, the user can set the multiple future maintenance windows to stop false alerts being triggered from BizTalk360. This feature can be found in the Settings area of the application.
Initially, BizTalk360 allowed users to set only a single maintenance window. From v8.8 onwards, users can setup multiple future maintenance windows. So, during these maintenance periods the alarms will be disabled and no notifications will be sent from BizTalk360. At the same time, a maintenance notification will be shown in the Home dashboard and in the Stop Alerts for Maintenance Settings section. Refer to this article, to know more about this enhancement.
What is the new enrichment?
The basic idea here, is that perhaps if a user is able to setup multiple maintenance windows, they need to configure the business holidays individually. It will take much of your time, to configure for every single environment in BizTalk360. To reduce the time and ease the maintenance configuration for the users, the capability to add business holiday calendars has been introduced.
What is a business holiday calendar?
BizTalk360 provides this new capability to configure the business holidays in a calendar. These business holiday calendars can be mapped during maintenance window setup. This new configuration section is introduced in the Monitoring Notification settings section as “Configure Business Holidays”.
Using this intuitive UI, users can configure the business holidays in a calendar and save it for further mapping during the maintenance setup process.
Let’s take an example: as a user, I wanted to configure a calendar for London business holidays. By clicking the “New” button, you can access the screen to configure the business holiday calendar.
After providing the basic details (Holiday Calendar Name, Description, Status), you can configure the dates for the business holiday in the Calendar Configuration part of the screen. For each date selection, a set of text boxes will be generated. The user has the liberty to provide their own text for the selected dates. On the right-hand side of the calendar configuration section, there are two checkboxes. Using these checkboxes, a user can include Saturdays and Sundays in the maintenance window. You can select both options or either one option, based on the business need.
Once the calendar is configured with business holidays, the user can save it for further use. The calendar will be listed in the Manage Business Holiday grid view. At any point in time, a user can add/delete new business holidays to the existing calendar configuration and save it. The changes will be updated automatically and maintenance will happen accordingly.
Preventing the business holiday calendar from accidental deletion
There is a chance that a configured calendar becomes deleted accidentally. The UI is designed in such a way that accidental deletion of calendars which are associated with maintenance windows is prevented. By any chance, if a user tries to delete a calendar which is associated with a maintenance window, a message will be shown in the UI that deletion is prevented.
How to associate the business holiday calendar to maintenance windows?
In the Stop Alerts for Maintenance settings page, A new section is introduced to configure the business holiday calendars. All the configured calendars with Status enabled will be displayed in the “Select Business Holiday Calendar” dropdown list. A user can select the desired calendar and use it for a maintenance window. During the business holiday, a maintenance window will be active.
There is a new tab “Business Holidays” added in the grid section to view the configured business holidays to the calendar.
Excluding alarms during maintenance
wherewith this capability, users can exclude alarms during the maintenance. This means, that, except the selected alarms, other alarms will undergo maintenance.
Scenario: Enable Monitoring for few alarms (for example to monitor system resources) during deployments or security patch updates.
Let’s consider a situation, where administrators have configured critical alarms to monitor the system resources (CPU usage, Memory usage) of their BizTalk Environment in BizTalk360. It is important to monitor these resources in their BizTalk Environment to identify any performance glitches as early as possible to avoid significant business consequences.
In such scenarios, there will be a need to keep those alarms always on. Though the environment is in maintenance mode, if administrators wanted to monitor their system resources, they can make use of this new capability.
This capability is very useful in situations where administrators don’t want to receive alerts during the weekends except for few alarms.
Conclusion
Definitely, these improvements are like icing on the cake to our existing Stop Alerts for Maintenance capability. Happy migrating and try BizTalk360!!!
Get started with the free 30 days trial. For any queries/feedback please write to us support@biztalk360.com.
Author: Mekala Ramesh
Test Lead at BizTalk360 – Software Testing Engineer having diverse exposure in various features and application testing with a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of SDLC. Strong knowledge to establish the testing process from the scratch. Love to test the software product to deliver it with good quality. Strongly believes on “Testing goes beyond just executing the test protocol”. View all posts by Mekala Ramesh
by Rochelle Saldanha | Jul 3, 2018 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Introduction
BizTalk360 allows you to setup monitoring on many artifacts and also allows you to auto-correct artifacts which have hit an unexpected state. During day to day operations it is very helpful to have this monitoring in place as it will save the BizTalk administrator(s) a lot of time because they don’t have to do that monitoring manually.
However, there are also times that you don’t want this monitoring to be active. Think of for example during maintenance windows because of deployments or installation of security patches. To temporarily stop monitoring, BizTalk360 provides a feature called ‘Stop Alerts for Maintenance’, which enabled the user to set up a single maintenance window. This feature can be found in the Settings area of the product.
In BizTalk360 v8.8, we have extended that feature by adding the capability to allow the user to setup multiple future maintenance windows. So during these periods the alarms will be disabled and no notifications will be sent.
In this article, we will take a detailed look at few end-to-end scenarios of settings up maintenance windows with a real-time scenario.
Scenario: Regular Maintenance windows
Let’s say, weekly on a Saturday some work involving performing weekly maintenance checks of the reliability, administration, security, and performance of a BizTalk Server system are done.
When the ports are down, you might continue to get notifications from BizTalk360 as it continues to monitor the BizTalk environment. In this case you would like to setup a maintenance window to stop all alerts during that period.
Follow the below steps as shown:
1. Log in to the BizTalk360 application
2. Go to the Settings page by clicking the Gear icon on top left hand side.
3. Navigate to ‘Monitoring & Notifications‘ and then ‘Stop Alerts for Maintenence‘
4. Select the environment which you wish BizTalk360 to stop monitoring and the correct date and start time of maintenance and the duration of the window. Also provide a Comment for Auditing purposes and click ‘Save’
5. Here you can set up future maintenance schedules. As these are saved in the BizTalk360 database, they are displayed in the Grid below the configuration section
The Alert Maintenance Schedule grid shows you the list of scheduled maintenance windows for that environment. You can also delete schedules in this table by clicking on the small bin icon on the right-hand side of each of the schedules. If you wish to see the Historical Maintenance Schedules that have gone past, you can switch Tabs and view the results there.
Scenario: Emergency maintenance window
In case some emergency is happening and you don’t want to receive falsified notifications from BizTalk360, you can also set this up.
1. Select the environment which you wish BizTalk360 to stop monitoring and the correct date and start time of maintenance and the duration of the window
2. Use the Immediate slider option for the maintenance window to start immediately
3. Define how long the Maintenance window must remain active
4. Give comment for Auditing purposes and click ‘Save’
Now the maintenance window is started immediately, and BizTalk360 notifications will cease while maintenance is on.
When the maintenance period is on
You will be alerted that the maintenance period is currently going on with an informational message both in the Operational dashboard as well as in the Stop Alerts screen as well.
Information regarding the start & end times of maintenance window will also be provided.
This feature is very useful to keep track of the maintenance schedules that are upcoming and those that have already passed. It also shows some form of auditing as you can see the person who scheduled a maintenance window in BizTalk360.
As soon as the maintenance window finishes, BizTalk360 will start sending notifications again based on the monitoring.
Purging maintenance windows
We have also set in place some purging policies to help manage the table size of the historical maintenance schedules.
To view this configuration
1. Log in to the BizTalk360 application
2. Go to the Settings page by clicking the Gear icon on top left hand side.
3. Navigate to ‘BizTalk360 Health‘ and then ‘Data Purging‘.
The default value is 15 days, so every 15 days the Alert & maintenance history is purged, but this can be changed as per your requirements.
Conclusion
If you want to read more about this and all the other features BizTalk360 provides, check out our Documentation portal.
Improvement of the existing ‘Stop Alerts for Maintenance’ feature was implemented based on the voting and requests on our feedback portal. If you feel there is any feature that would benefit you, please make a note in the feedback portal.
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 Praveena Jayanarayanan | Jun 19, 2018 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
With BizTalk360, the one stop monitoring solution for BizTalk server, we always understand the empathy of the customers and improve the product accordingly, by developing new features and enhancing the existing ones.
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know their expectations.” – Roy H. Williams
We receive customer suggestions/feedback through various channels like our support portal, the feedback forum, emails etc. We make sure that all these suggestions and feedback are being answered and that they are accommodated in the product. The outcome is a new version, being released with the new set of features, enhancements and of course several bug fixes.
“Success is not delivering a feature, it is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.” – Eric Ries
We understand the customer needs and add them to the product to make the product as suitable as possible for the user. We are delighted to announce the availability of BizTalk360 version 8.8 with the introduction of a new feature, most expected enhancements and bug fixes.
New Features
Import/Export of BizTalk360 configuration
This is the most wanted feature in BizTalk360 as suggested by most of the customers. In the earlier versions of BizTalk360, we had the ability to import and export the alarms. But there was a requirement to have the option to import/export the other features like user access, saved queries etc. In this new release of BizTalk360, we have the option to import/export the following between the BizTalk environments.
- Alarm – Already exists (Moving to the new menu in the settings side)
- User Access Policies
- Saved Queries
- MessageBox and Tracking queries
- Advanced Event Viewer queries
- ESB, BAM and EDI queries)
- Secure SQL Queries
Enhancements
The feedback portal is frequently monitored and we make sure the customers’ suggestions are heard and answered. Usually, higher vote requests are considered for the upcoming release implementation. This release of BizTalk360 includes the following enhancements, which were based on requests taken from the feedback portal.
Stop alerts for maintenance:
This feature is added to allow the user to setup multiple maintenance windows in the future, so that the alarms will be disabled during that period and no notifications will be sent. The following options are available:
- Can set multiple maintenance window
- View the historical maintenance schedules
- Maintenance notification will be shown in the dashboard with maintenance details like time and date
When the maintenance period is active, the user will be alerted that the maintenance period is currently going on with an informational message, both in the Operational dashboard as well as in Stop Alerts screen. Information regarding the start and end times of the maintenance window will also be provided.
A Purging policy is also set, for managing the table size of the historical maintenance schedules.
Allow users of applications to view Policies/Rules for just their application(s)
The user can now view the business rules associated for the application in the application view under “Application support” section, irrespective of the Business Rule Composer access permission.
Grid Filter capability
In a BizTalk environment, there are various types of data flows happening through the system. BizTalk360 allows users to query all the different types of data available in the BizTalk environment from a single location and the results are displayed in grid columns.
Our grid columns got a new makeover! This new capability is specially designed to improve grid performance in high-volume environments. Filtering grid columns could result in a good end-user experience and get faster desired result.
There are four types of filters namely,
- Date Time Filter
- Status Filter
- Boolean Filter
- String Filter
Pagination across all the modules
Pagination ability has been implemented across the product to improve the performance and usability of each grid view. This will divide the grid dynamically into separate pages, using the system settings configuration. A user can also change the grid page size dynamically. Based on the Max Match value, which can be configured in the System settings, a user can select a value for the pagination grid.
The user can switch the page by selecting the next/previous arrows and can also switch by selecting the page number directly at the bottom of the grid display. The selected page will get highlighted accordingly.
Export to Excel
This functionality is already available in BizTalk360. In this version, it has been enhanced for better usability purpose. Now the user can export multiple grid information either in a single sheet or in separate sheets as well. The link type Export to Excel option has been modified to a dropdown in case there are multiple exportable data sources present.
Notification emails with high importance
This is a new and powerful capability, which we have included in this version. Most of the time we receive a lot of emails and important messages. BizTalk360 notification emails may be overlooked in our long list of messages. This functionality is useful for support people to determine the priority of the emails and allowing the user to take action quickly.
BAM Enhancements
There were few changes made in BAM in our earlier release version v 8.7. This is continued in this new version as well.
- Now the user can download the message content from both the database as well as the archive folder
- Earlier, BAM data was getting displayed in the UTC date format irrespective of the user profile. Now this has been modified to display the BAM data in the user profile time format
Miscellaneous enhancements
The remaining enhancements include the following:
- Zoom in/out options for the modules Graphical Message flow /Message Patterns:
The zoom in/out option has been provided for viewing the message flows in the Graphical Message Flow and Message Patterns. This will help users to view the complete flow of messages involving complex orchestrations without any difficulty.
- Restart option for the analytics and monitoring services in the UI:
The user can now restart the analytics and monitoring services from BizTalk360 UI, without logging into the server where the services are installed. When the services are installed in high availability mode, the services will get restarted in all the servers where they are installed.
- Host Instance restart – This is a new functionality where users can restart the host instances from BizTalk360 itself
- The user can now terminate scheduled messages from BizTalk360 -> Message Box (Queries)
Issues resolved from different areas
We have closed around 70 support tickets as part of fixing the issues in different areas. Please refer the Release notes .
Conclusion
We always monitor the feedback portal and take up the suggestions and feedback. Now we would like to request you, our customers, to please take the time to fill this questionnaire to help us prioritize the next upcoming feature tasks, to let us know what are your main pain points and help us to further improve the product.
Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. Get started with the free 30 days trial.
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 | Mar 21, 2018 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
We are excited to launch version 8.7 of BizTalk360 where we have added improvements to existing features and resolved quite a few number of outstanding support tickets raised from our customers. No one looks forward to spring-cleaning. But think how much better your house/Ticketing system will feel when it’s done!
So, in this version, we decided to roll up our sleeves, and get down to business to resolve some of those dusty cobwebbed tickets and some much-needed fixes. Whenever a support ticket is received and identified as an issue, the support team moves it to bug status, so that it can be added to the development pipeline to be fixed.
As the years have gone by, BizTalk360 has really matured as a product, bringing out new features and enhancements every release (we typically plan a release every quarter). But this release, the team decided to concentrate on bug fixes and help the customer even more by giving them some much needed resolutions.
Resolving Issues from different areas
In this release, we have picked up about 63 support tickets across a wide range of areas. The number of tickets from each module can be seen below.
Providing alternate solutions to feedback portal issues
As a product based company, the suggestions and feedback from the customers are very important for the development of the product. We always welcome the feedback which the customers post on the feedback portal. Although at times we are unable to provide a fix in the product immediately, we do try and provide some workaround so the customer can keep using the product in the desired way.
1. Publish SQL Query as a custom widget
Here the customer wished to display the result of a SQL query in the Operations dashboard as a widget. We have taken a sample query and displayed the same as a widget.
2. BizTalk360 to run a BHM Monitoring Profile
In this scenario, the customer wished to run a BHM profile from BizTalk360. We analysed and found another way for BizTalk360 to pick up and run the BHM Profile setup with specific rules rather than the Default profile.
3. PowerShell Notification Channel
Another popular request was for BizTalk360 to perform some action along with the alerts that it sends. This can be actioned via a PowerShell script. This article outlines the steps to be followed to achieve this integration with BizTalk360.
BizTalk360 v8.7 Enhancements
There have been few enhancements that are added as part of BizTalk360 v8.7. These include
Triggering alert emails to admin users
Alert Notification will be sent to the admin users in case of any errors that occurred during the monitoring process. Admin users can be configured in the system alert settings section.
Pagination added for applications to improve performance
The pagination has been implemented for the “Application Support” section in BizTalk360. This will improve the performance while fetching the application artifacts where there are many applications and artifacts in the environment.
Data monitoring filter option in the dashboard
The performance of the filters in the data monitoring dashboard has been improved by having a filter option to select the specific alarms and corresponding status.
Installer logging capability
One challenge that we faced during the installation and upgrade of BizTalk360 is that, if the installation fails, then the support team would ask the customer to run the installation again with logging enabled and share the installation logs to identify the root cause. Now this logging is enabled as part of the installer itself and it would be easy to identify the problem in case of any installation issues.
Stop alerts for maintenance Notification in the dashboard
During the maintenance window, no notification was earlier shown in the UI. This is enhanced now and the notification ‘Environment is currently under Maintenance’ will be shown in the dashboard.
Feedback Portal News
We have been monitoring the feedback portal requests, and have been picking up the requests that have been popular.
>>Which feature would you like to see coming in BizTalk360 in the upcoming releases?<<
Now we would like to request you, our customers, to please take the time to fill this questionnaire to help us prioritize the next upcoming feature tasks, to let us know what are your main pain points and help us to further improve the product.
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 Sriram Hariharan | Jan 3, 2018 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
In 2017, we released 4 major releases and 3 patch releases of BizTalk360 with various new capabilities, usability improvements and bug fixes. We wanted to summarize the 15 best features we released in 2017 in this blog
1. EDI Capabilities
We enhanced the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities of BizTalk360 with new features such as —
- EDI Reporting Manager
- EDI Reporting Dashboard
- EDI Functional Acknowledgement Status
EDI Reporting Manager
With the EDI reporting manager capability, you can turn on/off reporting for each agreement in a single click. This becomes a very tedious process when performed using the BizTalk Administration Console (BAC), especially when there are multiple EDI parties and agreements. Users can also perform bulk enable/disable operations on the NRR configuration. Administrators have the option of adding the Host Partner information that is required to configure the host party for NRR configurations.
EDI Reporting Dashboard
We added a rich out-of-the-box EDI dashboard that will aggregate the different EDI transactions to help business users to visualize the EDI data in a better way. The different widgets available in the EDI Reporting Dashboard are EDI Interchange Aggregation widgets, EDI Transaction Set aggregation widgets, AS2 messaging aggregation reports.
We also added few new aggregations (as widgets) that are not available in the BizTalk Administration Console such as Interchange Count by Agreement Name (Top 10), Interchange count by Partner Name (Top 10), Transaction count by ACK Status (Filtered by partner id), AS2 messaging aggregation reports.
EDI Functional Acknowledgement Status
In any common B2B scenario, when a message is sent from the source to destination, an ACK will be sent back to the source with the status of the message (say, a technical acknowledgment TA1 or 997 functional ACK). Say, a message is sent from source to destination and the TA1 ACK is successfully received, but the 997 functional ACK is not received. With BizTalk Administration Console, it is not easy to identify the reason why the 997 functional ACK was not received by the sender. BizTalk360 brings in the capability to allow administrators to easily view the status of functional ACK within the UI and set up data monitoring alerts to get notified of negative functional ACKs.
2. ESB Dashboard
We added a new ESB Dashboard that will allow users to aggregate ESB reports into a single graphical dashboard. There are total 13 widgets that will help users understand their ESB integrations and to better analyse the data to improve performance. The widgets are categorized into 3 groups — Fault code widgets (based on application, service or error type), Fault code over time widgets, Itinerary Widgets.
3. Notification Channels (Webhook, Microsoft Teams)
We added two new notification channels — Webhook and Microsoft Teams in addition to the existing notification channels such as Email, HP Operations Manager, Slack, ServiceNow. The new webhook notification channel allows you to send structured alert notifications (JSON format) to any REST endpoints whenever there is a monitoring violation.
Additionally, users can now connect a Microsoft Teams channel to their respective BizTalk360 alarms with the proper Webhook URL and receive alert notifications directly to their Teams channel.
4. Azure Logic Apps (Operations, Data Monitoring)
We brought in the capability into BizTalk360 to be able to manage and monitor the Azure Logic Apps. Therefore, if you are using only the Logic Apps offering from Azure, you need not switch to Azure Portal to manage your Logic App. You can perform all operations on the Logic App such as Enable, Disable, Run Trigger, and Delete. The Trigger history and Run history details are available in both graphical and grid view.
In addition to Logic App Operational capabilities, users can configure Data monitoring to monitor and trigger alerts based on historical events.
5. IBM MQ Monitoring
In addition to MSMQ and Azure Service Bus Queue monitoring capabilities, we added the IBM MQ monitoring capability. IBM MQ monitoring supports both MQSC and MQS based configurations; you can monitor for the following 4 parameters – queue depth, backout queue depth, queue usage percentage and backout queue percentage.
6. Folder Monitoring, FTP/FTPS/SFTP Monitoring
With BizTalk360, we wanted to make monitoring of BizTalk resources very seamless in order to differentiate BizTalk360 from other general purpose monitoring solutions. We introduced the capability of Folder monitoring where users get to view all the configured receive locations and send ports that make use of the FILE Adapter and configure monitoring on those specific folders.
Similar to Folder monitoring, BizTalk360 also supports the monitoring of FTP, FTPS and SFTP adapters. The main purpose of configuring monitoring of these adapters is to monitor for data pile up!
7. Infrastructure Settings – New Additions
We added new options to the Infrastructure Settings — BizTalk and SQL NT Services and SQL Server Jobs. Users can perform operations like Start, Stop, Restart, Pause and Resume on the BizTalk and SQL NT Services. Similarly, users can manage SQL Server Jobs (start and stop SQL jobs) in BizTalk360.
8. BizTalk Server Licensing Information Widget
We added a new widget on the Home Dashboard screen that will display key information of the BizTalk server such as BizTalk edition, Server type, Processor, Manufacturer, Number of BizTalk Servers, Total number of license needed and estimated pricing.
For more details about BizTalk Server Licensing, please refer this blog article.
9. BizTalk Health Monitor Integration
BizTalk360 now supports BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM), previously known as Message Box Viewer (MBV). For many years, we had support for Message Box Viewer where we periodically run MBV in configured environments, parse and store the result and display it in the BizTalk360 web console.
10. BizTalk Server Host Throttling Monitoring & Availability Monitoring
The ability to monitor throttling is not something new in BizTalk360. With Throttling Analyser, you can easily identify when your BizTalk environment is throttling and in what particular state. With the new host throttling capability, you can visualize and get alerted whenever your BizTalk environment is in the throttling state.
In addition to host throttling monitoring, we also added the capability to monitor the availability of your BizTalk server, say, all your BizTalk servers are up and running. If something goes wrong with one of your BizTalk server, you will automatically get notified about this through the notification channel.
11. Email Template
You can now set up different email templates for different alarms — customize the colour of the email body, font, logo, background, footer background etc. You also have the option to create an email template with an in-built XSLT validator with preview options. We have provided an option for you to choose the notification template in a light/dark theme.
12. Azure Integration Account
In an effort to support Hybrid Integration, we have integrated Azure Integration Account within BizTalk360. This allows users to access Maps, Schemas, Certificates, Parties and Agreements stored in Azure Integration account in configured Azure subscriptions all withing BizTalk360 instead of logging into the Azure portal.
13. BizTalk Reports (Analytics)
We added this new feature “BizTalk Reports” under Analytics that offers capabilities for users to create schedules and generate PDF reports of performance metrics at specific time intervals (eg., daily/weekly/monthly). The PDF will contain the key performance metrics of BizTalk, SQL and IIS servers, messaging performance and so on.
14. Event Log Data Monitoring
In addition to the existing data monitoring configurations, users can now monitor the event logs from BizTalk and SQL server in a particular environment. Users can take advantage of the rich querying capabilities of BizTalk360 Data Monitoring to monitor the event sources from different servers in a single place.
15. BAM Related Activities and Documents
We enhanced the existing Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) feature to accommodate the Related Activities and Related Documents functionality similar to BAM portal. We brought in this feature due to the repeated requests from our customers. You can view the detailed information for the request, view the related activities for the request, download the related documents and view the response activity.
Author: Sriram Hariharan
Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote – “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”.
View all posts by Sriram Hariharan
by Mekala Ramesh | Oct 6, 2017 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication
Support service is one facet of business that is important to every business, regardless of industry, it is vital to delivering the best service possible to all customers.
To deliver a great product service that builds customers confidence, you must pay attention to customer feedback. Customers are a wealth of information and they can help to develop a better product.
Notifications give users confidence about the environment health status and if there is any problem they can take immediate action to solve it. BizTalk360 being a one platform solution for monitoring the BizTalk Servers, it supplies quick integration with ServiceNow, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webhook, apart from the default notification mediums – Emails and SMS. The integration is not restricted to just these channels, it is open to the customers. They can create their own custom notification channels which they use for work.
The above said Notification channels are by default bundled with BizTalk360 and make the customer life easier and not to spend much time on configuration. You can set up different alarm types (Threshold, Regular Health check, Data Monitoring) from BizTalk360 user interface and integrate with the desired Notification channels on which you want to receive the alerts.
In this article, we will be looking at the ServiceNow integration and how we have improved it in the upcoming BizTalk360 v8.6 release.
What are ServiceNow Integration’s existing fields?
In our upcoming Version 8.6 release, we have improved the ServiceNow notification channel based on the customer feedback, so here it is! For any ticketing system, the fields which are available will help the support personnel to determine the nature of the ticket and make the corrective action in a timely manner. Till V8.5 default ServiceNow notification channel has the below three fields.
- Short Description
- Impact
- Urgency
From V8.6 version onwards we have added the following fields to help our customer’s precisely keep track of changes happening up to the minute in their environment. By using these new fields, they can configure the additional information about the ticket from BizTalk360.
- Assignment Group
- Category
- Sub Category
- Configuration Item
- Additional comments
What happens during the Migration?
After the migration from earlier versions to v8.6, users can continue to work on the old template without any problem.
Let’s consider the below scenario:
A customer is using BizTalk360 version 8.4 presently and have configured 10 Alarms in their environment for monitoring and enabled the default ‘ServiceNow’ notification channel for sending the alerts. After the migration to the new version 8.6, there won’t be any change in the existing configuration in the alarms level. It will have the same configuration with the default 3 fields as such in V8.5
Once the user reconfigures the ServiceNow channel in Settings->Monitoring Notification->Manage Notifications channel, new changes will be applied. As per the configuration in BizTalk360, alert in ServiceNow channel will have the following fields.
Happy Migrating and try out the fresh installation once the release is announced!!! We are always happy to receive the customer’s feedback. Please write to support@biztalk360.com.
Author: Mekala Ramesh
Test Lead at BizTalk360 – Software Testing Engineer having diverse exposure in various features and application testing with a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of SDLC. Strong knowledge to establish the testing process from the scratch. Love to test the software product to deliver it with good quality. Strongly believes on “Testing goes beyond just executing the test protocol”. View all posts by Mekala Ramesh
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
