MBV Customization - Options and Profiles

Hello,

 

When  I discuss about MBV with my customers, I notice that they are very interested by the possibility to customize MBV so I would like to start a set of posts around the MBV customization.

 

In that post, I will talk first about MBV options and the notion of Profiles :

 

MBV options

 

MBV, in the "Global properties" tab (renamed '"Options" tab in the upcoming build 13.30) of its UI version,  provides a list of global options that you can  modify to change some MBV settings.

Some of these options are common to the custom Health Check framework that MBV is using, like the "SQL , WMI, or VBS Timeout", "Report Title" ,etc..and others are specific to the Repository currently loaded.

Remember that MBV is somewhere a generic Health Check application  loading a product repository (BizTalk in the case of MBV) containing some queries and rules to process, and using a common Health Check Framework (running the queries and processing the rules).

The options specific to the BizTalk repository are for example "BizTalk Mgmt DB server",   "BizTalk Mgmt DB Name", or the option "Log Msg Flow Report" .

This is a list of available MBV options as they appear in the UI version of MBV :

 

 

Some of these global options allow to customize the output of the MBV report :

 

- Log Query Reports

- Log Topology Report

- Log Summary Report

- Log Dashboard Report

These options allow indeed to include or not some reports in the MBV output files.

By default they will be all included but you can for example decide to not include the Topology Report in the output files (because you have it already) .

You can also decide to not include the result of the queries executed and keep only the Warnings, Summary, and Dashboard Report so you can disable the query report generation.

You can even keep only the Warnings and Dashboard reports.

This customization allows you to generate more compact output files which will be more easy then to analyze. 

 

 

MBV Profiles

 

MBV has a notion of profile than you can load to reuse a set of options and queries.

All the MBV options described above, the selected  queries, the custom query properties, the selected rules and any created custom rules are saved in the current loaded profile when exiting MBV.

A profile is physically saved in a file named "MBVSettings_<profilename>.xml ".

You can see quickly the available profiles in the combobox "Current Profile" in the right pane of MBV UI :

A

 

- That Profile combobox contains the default profile, some predefined profiles '"Minimum" and "Full", and also the available custom profiles :

The "Default" profile is managed physically by the file MBVSettings.xml and is the profile loaded when MBV is started.Any change in that profile will be reflected at the next MBV Startup.

When selected, the Minimum profile selects only the queries of the "Important" category  and the Full profile selects ALL the queries of all query categories. These predefined profiles provides so a quick way to do a quick collect or a complete one.

The created custom profiles available in the MBV current folder will appear then in the combobox.

- The button "Save As" allows to save the current profile under a new named  profile.

You can so define your own custom profile selecting the queries you need, definining your own values fore some query properties, and even creating your own rules, and then save this selection in a custom profile than you can reload after.

- A custom profile or a predefined one can be selected quickly via the combobox in UI version of MBV but can also be used with the Console version of MBV using the "-PROFILE:" parameter :

 

Ex:

"MBVConsole -PROFILE:MBVSettings_DailyCheck"

"MBVConsole -PROFILE:MINI"

"MBVConsole -PROFILE:FULL"

 

 

Profile and Header report

 

The header section of a report generated by MBV will contain the name of the profile used for the collect  :

 

 

 

Profile scenario sample 

 

A good example of profiles usage is if you decide to Schedule MBV periodically (daily, weekly,etc...).

If you want to schedule MBV every day morning and evening for example, you can use the Windows Scheduler to start periodically MBVConsole.exe using a specific custom profile to load.

In that case, when entering the program to start in the Action of the Scheduled MBV task, you can specify in the "Add Arguments" field the profile to load  :

 

Ex:

  -PROFILE:MINI

or

- PROFILE:MBVSettings_MyProfile 

 

 

 

 Summary

 

Both MBV UI and Console versions are sharing a same Health Check framework that provies a profile mecanism to reuse a set of settings.

An MBV profile is just a settings file keeping all the global options of MBV, a set of selected queries and rules, custom query properties and custom rules.

MBV UI allows to change the global options and select the queries and rules to execute and allows to save such selection in a reusable profile, and both MBV UI and MBV Console can then load either the default profile, a predefined profile (Mini or Full), or any custom profile.

 

 

 

I hope really that this post will push you to play with MBV options and profiles to customize MBV according to your own needs.

 

In a next  post, I will talk more about some specific global options wihch are intresting to change in some specific scenarios.

 

Thanks

 

JP

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  thank you