Interesting support cases 2018 – Part 2
In my previous blog post, I have highlighted 5 interesting cases we received and solved in the past year. In this blog, I would like to add 5 more interesting support cases.
Let’s get into the cases.
Case 6: Data Monitor Dashboard slow to respond
In the year 2017, we have started a new initiative called ‘Customer Relationship Team. This team will get in touch with our customers regularly in the frequency of 3-4 months. The team will make sure about how the customers are using the BizTalk360 product, whether they are facing any problems, and if they have any queries.
If so, we will clarify the customer queries during the call. If can’t clarify the problem within the short time of the call, then we will create a support case for their queries and make sure we will solve the case.
In one such a call, a customer raised a concern about the Data monitoring dashboard being slow to respond and it takes more and more time.
Troubleshooting
During the investigation of the slowness, we came to know that the customer had configured 147 data monitoring alarms. Out of those, 110 data monitoring alarms were scheduled for every 15 minutes cycle, which will produce a huge result.
In more detail:
110 data monitoring results for every 15 minutes cycle.
110*4*8(business hours) = 3520 results.
110*4*24(whole day) = 10,560 results.
Loading 10k results in a single load, for sure it will take time to load all the results.
Solution
Most of the customers won’t use many schedules for data monitoring alarms. To handle such a huge load, we have improved the performance of the data monitoring dashboard, by having a filter option to select the specific alarms and corresponding status. The improved data monitoring dashboard is available from version 8.7 on.
Case 7: System resources configuration
A customer faced an exception ‘the network path was not found’ while trying to enable SQL Server System resources monitoring.
Troubleshooting
We have requested the customer to check the below things:
- The BizTalk360 service account is a local admin on the machine where SQL server is hosted
- The Remote Registry service is started or not
- Firewall ports are opened for SQL server
- From BizTalk360 server, can you connect to that SQL server through SQL Management Studio
- Connect to the remote computer (SQL Server configured for monitoring) from the BizTalk360 machine where the monitoring service is running
All other steps were passed, but in the Perfmon, while connecting the SQL Server on the BizTalk360 installed machine, they have faced the same exception.
Solution
To open the SQL server on another machine, port 1433 needs to be enabled. To monitor System resources of SQL machine, an additional port needs to be enabled ‘135’, which is for RPC and WMI. We have mentioned the depended ports what needs to be enabled in our existing blog.
Even after adding the port, still the problem persisted. At last, we found that the firewall rules were not activated/enabled, once after activating the rules we were able to solve the case. This is one such case in which we all missed to check the basic step that a rule should be activated because no one had access to view the rules other than the customer’s admin.
Case 8: SFTP Monitoring – PublicKeyAuthendication
A customer was trying to configure monitoring for an SFTP location and they were facing issues. It was working fine for the customer when the authentication was used with a simple username and password. However, once they configured for PublicKeyAuthendication, they faced issues during the configuration.
Troubleshooting
We started with the basic troubleshooting steps like authentication, access permissions and we understood that it has all rights to access the FTP site. During the investigation, we found that in a folder BizTalk was picking up the inner folders as well, instead of picking the files alone.
Solution
To find the exact root cause of the issue, we have developed a console application (with logs enabled) and provided it to the customer. It provided a clear picture of the problem, as mentioned earlier it has calculated the folder for PublicKeyAuthentication. Now, this has been fixed.
Case 9: Message Count mismatches
A customer faced a problem between the Receive and Send ports for the message count at Analytics Messaging Patterns.
Troubleshooting
The customer had a very simple scenario (see below) where a file is picked up and placed in a different location, but the Send Port count shows the Receive Port count twice. He gets similar doubling up on Receive and Send ports for other message flows as well.
Example:
Send Port – 12 messages
Receive Port – 6 messages
During the investigation, we have found that whenever BizTalk retries to submit the suspended messages the counts get double.
Solution
As of now, we are showing the message transfer count rather than the message count. We are doing this because this will help us to determine the message performance of BizTalk Artifacts in an environment. We are going to take this as a feature enhancement in the future.
Case 10: Not possible to expand columns in query outcome
Normally you can expand the column size of the query outcome in a grid. But customers were facing a problem that they were unable to expand the columns in the MessageBox Queries grid.
Troubleshooting
During the investigation the customers were facing this problem in Chrome, but not in Internet Explorer and Firefox. They faced the same issue while opening the browser in an incognito window as well. This is really something very strange for us, because while using the same version we were not able to reproduce the same problem.
We have investigated at the code level and everything seems fine at our end. So, we have decided to go for a meeting. During the meeting, we were able to see the problem at the customer end and we had no clue at that time, requested a few days time and closed the meeting.
We analyzed the case and it was hard to reproduce the case at our end. It is working for most of our team members and only a few are facing this issue. The team member who faced the issue and the one who’s working fine worked together, they compared each component from scratch to find what’s the difference and we found the cause.
Solution
If the Chrome page is zoomed out or zoomed in, then the column resize wasn’t working for us and this happened at the customer as well.
It seemed that this was a problem with the Kendo Grid control in the latest version this issue was introduced by Kendo. We worked along with Kendo and solved the case.
Satisfaction does it!
As a support engineer, we receive different cases on a daily basis. Every support case is unique because the problem will be faced by different customers in different environment architecture. But some of the support cases are interesting by the root cause of the problem and the way of troubleshooting the case. I’m happy that I have worked on such challenging and interesting cases.
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