Advanced BizTalk Host Instances Monitoring

Published on : Feb 1, 2013

Category : BizTalk Server

Saravana

Author

One of our potential prospect (a big Aircraft manufacturer) is evaluating BizTalk360 for their BizTalk Server monitoring requirements. We been working with them for few weeks helping them on the proof of concept. Yesterday we received the following query from them to clarify BizTalk360’s advanced host instances monitoring capability Prospect Query:
We have BizTalk servers A, B and C in the BizTalk group. We have the host instance in started state in A, disabled state in B and disabled state in C. As this is an expected state we don’t want 360 to complain as an issue..As we are trying out in test environment I cant send you screen shot at this time. Is this possible?
Our answer: Absolutely.

BizTalk Host Instances Monitoring

Let’s see it in bit more detail. One of the big advantages of BizTalk360 host instances monitoring is it’s ability to monitor any states not just “Started” state. This is one of the common scenarios in a real life BizTalk environments. We have seen scenarios where people keep host instances in disabled state for various reasons like the host instances are brought live only during throttling conditions, or they are used for testing purposes (even in production environments), or they use one of the polling adapters like FTP, POP3 and don’t have the bandwidth to configure and setup Windows clustering,  and they use manual methods to start host instances in second server etc.. BizTalk Host Instances Monitoring - Positive Screen Configuring monitoring for such scenario is very simple. As shown in the above picture, BizTalk360 allows user to select a particular host instance and set the required (“Expected”) state. In the above example from our test environment we wanted the host instance “BizTalkServerApplication” to be in started state in the server KOV006W2008R2 and it must be in a disabled state in the server KOV007W2008R2. If someone accidentally enable the host instance in KOV007W2008R2, BizTalk360 will automatically pick up the threshold violation (since the current state and expected state will mismatch) and send notification alerts (email, sms, HP Operation Manager console etc. ) You can notice from the below screen, the host instance monitoring turned RED, because we manually enabled the particular host instance in the server KOV007W2008R2 BizTalk Host Instances Monitoring - Negative Screen In a nutshell BizTalk360 gives you the flexibility to monitor the BizTalk host instances for any available state like Started, Stopped, and Disabled. This is one of the great advantage of using BizTalk360 for BizTalk monitoring, since it’s 100% focused on BizTalk monitoring. Try it for yourself