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BizTalk Monitoring Tools

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Introduction

Managing BizTalk can be done with the out of the box Administration Console, which focuses on BizTalk Group itself, managing applications, adapters,  and for troubleshooting purposes. It is not suitable for monitoring BizTalk, generating alerts and notifications. Commercially and through CodePlex there are products and tools available that can fulfill monitoring requirement for an enterprise/organization. These product/tools are:

System Center Operation Manager

Microsoft offers System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) enables overall end-to-end monitoring of your entire enterprise IT infrastructure and its applications (i.e. other server products like BizTalk, Exchange, and third party software). Through a single UI an administrator and/or engineer can monitor the health, performance and availability of data center environments – across applications, operating systems, hypervisors and even hardware through usage of management packs. SCOM uses the term management pack to refer to a set of filtering rules specific to some monitored application like BizTalk Server. This management pack after importing into SCOM offers two views one intended for BizTalk administrator/operator and one for Enterprise IT administrator:

  • Application View: A BizTalk administrator or operator is able with this view to monitor the state and health of various BizTalk Server artifacts and applications such as orchestrations send ports, receive locations, and so on.
  • Deployment View: An enterprise IT administrator is able with this view to monitor the state and health of the various enterprise deployments the machines hosting the SQL Server databases, machines hosting the SSO service, host instance machines, IIS, network services, and so on.

You can learn or evaluate SCOM through administration course Microsoft has made available:

The following resources will provide more background and information:

HP OpenView

HP OpenView provides software for large-scale system and network management of an organization's IT infrastructure. It is a suite of business computer management  programs from Hewlett-Packard (HP). An IT professionals can use OpenView to manage applications, device availability, network conditions and status, system performance, service and program maintenance, and storage resources. This is quite similar to what SCOM has to offer. You will find more information in the Whitepaper Monitoring BizTalk Server with HP OpenView.

HP OpenView is end-of-life-cycle however. In 2007 it was rebranded when it became part of HP Software Division.

Alternative solutions BizTalk Monitoring

Monitoring BizTalk can be done using SCOM or HP OpenView by administrators and issues can be diagnosed and resolved using BizTalk administration console with or without combination of other tools (BizTalk Server 2010 - Tools). To use SCOM solely for BizTalk monitoring might be too costly for mid-sized organization or even an enterprise. The product requires highly skilled people to implement and operate SCOM, and it has a steep learning curve. Besides the skillset it also requires an investments in fair amount of hard- and software. Since SCOM can monitor any Microsoft product, Azure and third-party products it would be waste of resources to just use SCOM for monitoring BizTalk. SCOM be a perfect combination with some tools listed in this article and/or HP OpenView.

Integration Platform Monitor

Integration Platform Monitor is a specialized solution to monitor BizTalk centric integration solutions. Formally this product was called BizMon and developed by Richard Hallgren. Last year May 2010 BizMon Integration Monitoring tool (BizMon) was acquired by Communicate Norge AS (Communicate), and is now owned, maintained and supported by Communicate. It is currently at version 2.0. The following resources can be used to download the tool, find guidance in usage and background information:

BizTalk 360

BizTalk360 is a web based BizTalk monitoring and support tool for Microsoft BizTalk Server. It addresses some of the common problems customers face today like governance/auditing, fine grained authentication, remote access and so on. The product has been developed by Saravana Kumar and as of February 2016, it is available in version 8.0. In this release various new features have been introduced like Analytics, a web based BRE editor, custom notification targets and a complete new dashboard including widgets. BizTalk360 supports version 2006 and up. It can be downloaded from the product site and is easy to evaluate on any BizTalk environment. The following resources reveal more background information and some user experience stories:

Minotaur

Minotaur is a complete end to end solution for monitoring BizTalk Server Enterprise solutions. Minotaur provides a web-based user interface with a simple and intuitive dashboard, providing your operations staff with a real-time view of their BizTalk environments. This product was owned and maintained by Raging Bull Tech, but 1st of November Inobits Inc has acquired Minotaur and will support it. It is currently at version 2.0.  Minotaur supports all BizTalk versions. The following resources can be used to download the tool, find guidance in usage and background information:

Frends Helium

FRENDS Helium is a web-based monitoring tool for your BizTalk Server installations. This product is owned and maintained by company Frends. It is currently at version 1.1. Helium supports BizTalk Server 2009 / 2006 R2 / 2006 environments. The following resources can be used to download the tool, find guidance in usage and background information:

Codit Integration Dashboard

The Codit Integration Dashboard is a web based management tool that allows functional key users to monitor and manage the integration processes of their own business domain. This product is owned and maintained by company Codit. It is currently at version 3.22 and supports BizTalk Server 2006 and up. The following resource can be used to find more information:

Moesion

Moesion is new product target to provide monitor capabilities to tablets and/or smart phones. This product is owned and maintained by company TellagoStudios. It is currently at version 1.0 and supports BizTalk Server 2004 and up. The following resources can be used to download the tool, find guidance in usage and background information:

BizTalk Control Center

BizTalk Control Center (BCC) is a remote BizTalk monitoring and management application. BCC can be used to deploy, monitor and administer BizTalk Artifacts. It is a CodePlex project maintained by Naveen Karamchetti and Kutub Shikora. It is currently at version 3.2 and supports BizTalk 2006 and up. The following resources can be used to download the tool, find guidance in usage and background information:

BizTalk Processing Monitor

BizTalk Processing Monitor (or BPM) tool enables you to monitor message flow through your BizTalk systems. Most monitoring software mentioned in this article monitor for example the availability of endpoints. Important to know if your endpoints are up-and-running, yet this does not guarantee that messages actually are flowing through your system. BPM provides that insight and in case of any interruptions, the user will got notified. Tool is currently in its public beta.

Nagios with op5 Monitor

Nagios is an open source computer system monitoring, network monitoring and infrastructure monitoring software application, which is based on Linux. Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications, and services. It alerts the users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved.

The following BizTalk artifacts can be monitored with a plugin, which is developed by op5:

  • Ports
  • Send ports
  • Queues
  • Location
  • Orchestrations
  • Cluster Host Instance process
  • Spool size
  • MSDTC process

In addition to this it's also possible to monitor BizTalk related metrics and performance counters.

More information can be found at the following resources:

AIMS

AIMS is an intelligent performance monitoring and analytics solution that simplifies Microsoft BizTalk Server monitoring and reporting. AIMS applies machine learning to automatically map the entire integration environment – on-prem, hybrid and cloud – and proactively monitor and provide real-time business intelligence.

The AIMS BizTalk agent provides 360 degree discovery/mapping and automated monitoring of all parameters on all BizTalk artifacts - out of the box and without any manual alert or threshold configuration. The agent has close to zero performance impact so it is safe to install to any low-latency / high-throughput environment. AIMS provides real-time transaction tracing and latency monitoring down to individual ports and orchestrations and end-to-end through the complete value-chain. AIMS also provides additional integration support agents and an SDK to create custom monitoring agents.

Tivoli Monitor

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft .NET: BizTalk Server provides you with the capability to monitor Microsoft BizTalk Server, and to perform basic actions with Microsoft BizTalk Server.With IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Microsoft .NET: BizTalk Server you can use preconfigured resource models to monitor essential resources, and you can customize the preconfigured resource models to monitor your resources. A resource model accesses specific performance data from the system at runtime.(For example, the Process resource model gathers data about processes running on the system.) The resource models process the data they collect using an algorithm that determines whether or not the system is performing according to expectations.  This enables you to detect bottlenecks and other potential problems and define automatic recovery actions from critical situations affecting your resources. This ability frees system administrators from manually scanning extensive performance data. This monitoring software integrates with other Tivoli® Availability solutions, including IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.

For Configuration Model:

Integration Manager

Integration Manager is a web based logging & monitoring tool that allows you to simply log any kind of message as well as to monitor any kind of resource. Integration Manager delivers a service that is especially designed for Microsoft BizTalk Server, but also a C# template that allows you to develop your own service & agents to log and monitor anything. Together with the built in Repository Model with which you can document your integrations easily it is a powerful tool that gives you and your customers the possibility to save money, time and resources.

Integration Manager is a suite of the following entities

  • Logging
  • Monitoring
  • Reports
  • Repository Model

It is easy to use, dynamic, flexible, powerful as well as platform independent. Read more about Integration Manager.

BizTalkTracker

BizTalkTracker is primarily intended for the non-technical user who wishes to know if certain or any messages has been received and/or where messages has ended up after being routed through a BizTalk Server. Especially companies sending and receiving EDI will benefit from using this product.

BizTalkTracker gives a full overview and easy access to the BizTalk tracking data and a number of additional advantages:

  • Easy access to view the message body
  • Full end-to-end overview for all incoming messages
  • Search on promoted properties across message types
  • Alerts (Both message type and port alerts)
  • Non-intrusive

Conclusion

SCOM and HP OpenView both offer end-to-end monitoring of your entire enterprise IT infrastructure and its applications and are part of a suite of products. Focus of both products are enterprise wide and for some organizations too costly to implement when it comes down to solely monitoring BizTalk Server. SCOM and HP OpenView can be a good combination, where one can benefit from BizTalk Management Pack. When organizations do not have either of these in place and desire to have a monitoring solution in place they can opt for one of the alternative tools, which all offer a web-interface, support latest BizTalk versions and some offer a broad set of extra features. These tools also can be combined with SCOM/HP OpenView as they complement them. There are quite a few options when it comes down to implement a monitoring solution and it is worth exploring each option and look at offers of all products and tools. In case it comes down to comparing products or combining them that review resources in this article can be worthwhile your time.

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See Also

Read suggested related topics:

Another important place to find a huge amount of BizTalk related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki.