Why Write Code For BAM?
In most circumstances you can use the BAM tools without writing your own code to perform your tracking functions. These tools are the BAM Add-in for Excel, the BAM Management utility, and the Tracking Profile Editor (TPE). BAM in BizTalk Server provides interceptors for BizTalk orchestrations and messaging components (pipelines and ports). An interceptor is software that instruments an application so that it can collect data in a generic way based on a configuration file. You can instrument your application to use these interceptors by using the Tracking Profile Editor. For more information about the Tracking Profile Editor, see Tracking Profile Editor.
There are two primary scenarios, however, in which you will find it advantageous to instrument your application using the BAM APIs:
There is no BAM interceptor for the host you intend to monitor.
The built-in interceptor does not allow for the complexity of your application.
When there is no built-in interceptor, you can use the BAM EventStream APIs to capture the events of interest.
Note
You can combine EventStream classes with the BAMInterceptor class to create your own interceptor. The BAM API SDK sample illustrates a simple generic interceptor that you can extend. By constructing your own interceptor you can instrument a number of similar processes without writing new code for each application. To view the BAM API SDK sample, see BAM API (BizTalk Server Sample).