Message Box Viewer – BizTalk360 Integration

Last week we announced the release of BizTalk360 2.5, one of our major milestones with some core functionalities like

• Role Based Security
• Knowledgebase Repository
• Message Box Viewer Integration
• Message Details (Context/Content)
• Alert/Notification enhancements
• BizTalk360 Health – To-Do list + few other behind the scene improvements.

We received a very positive responses in social media sites. Over the next few days we are going to cover all these functionalities in detail by various mediums. Today’s topic is Message Box Viewer, Steef Jan Wiggers has already broken the thunder by blogging about with an article here.

Why did we do it?

Initially we were thinking down the line of custom building something what Message Box Viewer was doing to give a seamless experience within BizTalk360. Soon we realized, the amount of rules covered by Message Box viewer is immense and it will take us very long time to achieve it. Also with one of our recent engagement with Microsoft for a customer issue we realized the important of Message Box Viewer and the role it plans in the Microsoft Support. (If you raise a call with Microsoft for any BizTalk environment issues, the first thing they’ll ask you to do is run MBV and act upon the report’s critical and non-critical errors). We also learned, it’s a good practice to run it periodically either once a day or once a week and react to the errors reported by MBV. None of your monitoring solutions like SCOM or HP Openview or BizTalk360’s monitoring solutions will catch some of the scenarios raised by MBV. Let me give you an example. I’ve taken the following screen shot from Steef-Jan Wiggers blog post If you spot the first line, it raise it as critical error showing “BizTalk 2010 databases are installed on SQL 2008”, so you need to take the action “Install SQL Server 2008 SP1 or R2” This is a business rule check for your BizTalk Server environment health, this will not be covered in any of your monitoring solutions. There are other tons of rules similar to this. Even the last one in the above list is a good one “Total active ‘Cache msg’ for MsgBox”.

What did we do?

Instead of duplicating the efforts of Message Box Viewer in BizTalk360, we deeply integrated MBV with BizTalk360 and enhanced the benefits by offering the following things

1. Ability to schedule MBV execution for BizTalk Environments
2. Reports readily available in the UI (as shown in the above picture)
3. Importantly! You can schedule alerts based on report. Ex: If critical errors more than 4, send a notification.

We have written a detailed document how you can configure and use Message Box Viewer in BizTalk360 in our support center. Configuring Message Box Viewer, and Message Box Viewer Integration

Take a quick look at the videos

We also produced 3 short videos (max 2-3 minutes/video) to show the above topics. Scheduling, Reporting: Alert/Notification: Message Box Viewer – BizTalk360 Configuration: