Monitoring and Alert Notification capabilities
BizTalk360 allows us to monitor all kinds of resources associated with the different BizTalk Server infrastructure layers, in which we can highlight:
Services and Applications
Allows us to monitor HTTP addresses or external Web service codes for known errors (e.g., 200, 202, etc.).
We can monitor the expected state (Started, Stopped, Enlisted, Un-enlisted, Enabled, or Disabled) of orchestrations, send ports, or receive locations.
📝 One-Minute Brief
In this fourth installment, Sandro Pereira explores the extensive monitoring and alert notification capabilities of BizTalk360. The tool covers every layer of the BizTalk infrastructure, from applications and services to the underlying OS and server hardware. Key features include monitoring artifact states (Started/Stopped), process monitoring for message volume thresholds, SQL Job health (critical for MessageBox backups), and system resource tracking (CPU, memory, disk space). With customizable alert rules and notifications via email or SMS, BizTalk360 ensures you find out about failures—and fixed problems—immediately.
BizTalk360 also allows us to monitor processes. Process monitoring is designed to help customers tackle common scenarios, without any custom development, for example:
- We expect to receive or send a certain number of messages to or from a given environment. If this rule is not followed, then there should be an implication in the business, and someone needs to be notified.
- Your trading partner sends you some files via FTP every day. If you receive the file, everything works smoothly, but what happens if there is a problem on your partner’s end (ex, some firewall patch) and you didn’t receive any messages from them for a couple of days?
- You may want to keep an eye on the sales threshold, for ex, you expect to receive a certain volume of messages in your system every business day from your trading partner(s).
Automatic monitoring of failures or violations, which allows us to control how these are reported to us, for example:
- If it is an intermittent problem? If so, wait 10 minutes before sending alerts.
- Send only 5 alerts instead of 100 in the next 4 hours.
- If someone fixes the problem, we can also configure the system to notify us.
We can define these notifications to be sent via email or SMS.
BizTalk Server Platform
BizTalk360 allows us to monitor the state of the Host Instances, SQL Jobs, or NT Services. For each of them, we can also define the state that is expected, this point, for example, is extremely useful to monitoring SQL job that comes with BizTalk since it is not supposed to be all active (MessageBox_Message_Cleanup_BizTalkMsgBoxDb must be deactivated and shall be activated by the job MessageBox_Message_ManageRefCountLog_BizTalkMsgBoxDb).
SQL Server and in particular “MessageBox” database are the heart of the BizTalk Server platform and it’s for this reason that Microsoft SQL Server usually comes as a “black box” when it comes to BizTalk Server, is something that we know exists, but we shouldn’t play around! BizTalk Server includes a series of SQL jobs to perform its entire management: backups, cleaning, and so on, that ensure the perfect functioning of the platform. In reality, and contrary to what many DBAs use and do, the only way to ensure a full backup and enable its trusted restoration is by using these SQL Jobs and not other processes usually created for this functionality.
To ensure that all these activities, especially the backups, are working properly, the BizTalk administration team or DBA needs to periodically monitor these Jobs. BizTalk360 helps us solve all these challenges by providing mechanisms for monitoring and notifications:
As well a “BizTalk Backup and Disaster Recovery” view panel that displays all the details in a simpler/graphical way.
BizTalk360 also gives us the ability to monitor the Service Instances status, allowing, for example, to define different levels of warning and/or error for the number of service instances with a specific state (Suspended, Active, Scheduled, etc.) in applications. If the number of service instances crosses the threshold, a notification will be sent.
Operation System
The ability to monitor the usage of CPU or memory consumption, allowing us to configure alert levels of error and/or warning on the amount of free memory or CPU consumption. For example, send a notification if the free memory falls below the values set for a period of 30 minutes or if the consumption of the CPU is maintained above the values defined during a period of time.
And also the ability to monitor event logs, allowing us to be able to configure various rules based on your requirements to different notifications, for example:
- Trigger notification if the number of errors associated with BizTalk occurs more than 10 times in the last 30 minutes.
- You can configure that if there are 10 MSI installation events in the last 30 minutes, then trigger a notification.
- Or whenever a host instance is started/stopped so many times in the last 60 mins.
Server Hardware
Ability to monitor hard drives, allowing once again sending notifications if the free space on the disks reaches the defined values.
