BizTalk 360 – Integrated BAM Portal

Published on : May 9, 2011

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Saravana

Author

BizTalk 360 comes with an integrated Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) portal, which gives the ability to query BAM views, perform activity searches, check user permission and check activities time window. If you have used BizTalk server BAM functionality for your applications BizTalk 360 will automatically pick up those configurations and display it. There is no necessity to do any additional configurations. Let’s take a look.

Business  Activity Monitoring  – Home Screen

biztalk bam portal The above picture shows the home screen of the BAM portal. The home screen lists all the BAM view’s currently configured in the environment and it list all the BAM databases configured. From a monitoring perspective it’s important to keep an eye on the size of database data and log files. BizTalk 360 eases this process by displaying them on the home screen as shown above.

BAM View – Object Explorer

bam view When you expand the BAM node in the object explorer it automatically list’s all the BAM views deployed in the environment. For example, in the above picture the current test environment got 2 BAM views deployed.

BAM View – Activity Search

bam view activities A BAM view can have one or more activities, Activity search functionality allows users to query the activity data as shown above. When the user selects a “BAM View” from the object explorer, the above screen is shown, it automatically populates all the activities in that “BAM View” in a drop down list. The user can then select the appropriate activity. Once the activity is selected, all the available columns in that activity are populated on the “Available Columns” list, the user can then move the required columns to “Selected Columns” list, optionally user can also tell how to sort the results by moving appropriate columns to “Order by Columns”. (Note: multiple columns can be selected and moved between available, selected and order by columns). There is also a powerful query builder functionality to fine grain the results, which is explained bit more in detail in next section. Once everything is set, user can then press the “Execute Query” button to see the results.

Activity Search Query Builder:

BizTalk 360 integrated BAM portal comes with powerful query builder, which allows the support people to query the BAM data seamlessly.

Values are pre-populated:

Instead of asking the support person to enter the data manually, BizTalk 360 pre-populates the available values in the drop down list, so the user can simply select the appropriate ones. advanced filter view

Rich editor for corresponding data types:

BizTalk 360 automatically understands the data type of the column and displays a corresponding input type, for example if its a date time column, it displays a rich calendar/time picker as shown below. refine search by port start time

BAM View – User Permission

In order to view the “BAM data” users should have appropriate permission. BizTalk 360 comes with integrated user permission display screen which lists all the users and roles that got permission for that particular BAM View as shown below. bam view user permission

BAM View – Activity Time Window

When you create and deploy BAM activities, by default it will have an active time window of 6 months. It’s important to review activity time window based on your requirement and change it if necessary. You can refer to this previous article BAM Production Environment management to understand the importance of activity time window. The BAM data will reside in the active BAMPrimaryImport database based on the active windows time frame. Normally you can get to this data only by using the command line BAM management tool bm.exe by passing right arguments, but BizTalk 360 makes it seamless and bring the information straight into the integrated BAM portal as shown below. bam view activity time window

BAM Security:

BizTalk 360 piggy backs the security infrastructure provided by BizTalk server to access any BAM related data. This gives the maximum protection and it respects the existing BAM security setup. It’s important to make sure the BAM data is protected, since it might have some sensitive information.

Summary:

When it comes to monitoring and supporting a BizTalk environment, its vital to give the application support person s eamless access to all the required information. That’s the main objective behind BizTalk 360 and the integrated BAM portal functionality is one of them. This avoids the support person to jump into different tools to get to different data all related to the same application/environment they are supporting. Social: Twitter: @biztalk360 facebook: http://facebook.com/biztalk360 support: http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360 PS: If in case you haven’t noticed BizTalk 360 is a web based (RIA) application, built using Microsoft SilverLight. The above screens are accessible via browser. There is no necessity to install anything on the client PC except Microsoft SilverLight.