BizTalk receive location

Automated Recovery Features of BizTalk360 – How to Deal Effectively When Your Receive Locations Gets Disabled

Published on : Nov 30, 2020

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Christhini

Author

Introduction

BizTalk360 exists for close to 10 years. In these 10 years, we have constantly brought new features based on customer requirements. Every year, we have around 3 to 4 major releases of the product. In this blog post, we will explain one of the main key features of BizTalk360 which was constantly requested by our customers. We gather this information through the BizTalk360 feedback portal.

BizTalk feedback portal

This blog post comes as a series of 5 like how you can get the effective benefit of the  Automated recovery features of BizTalk360. In this blog post, we will cover the first part.

  • BizTalk360 Automated recovery features – Part 1 – How to deal effectively when your receive locations gets disabled
  • BizTalk360 Automated recovery features – Part 2 – How to improve service availability
  • BizTalk360 Automated recovery features – Part 3 – How to optimize your Windows resources
  • BizTalk360 Automated recovery features – Part 4 – How to automate suspended instance operations
  • BizTalk360 Automated recovery features – Part 5 – How to automatically clean up unneeded service instances

Free download this blog as a PDF document for offline read.

Auto Correct– Keynote

Why do we need Auto correct feature?

Let us consider a scenario: –

It is midnight and suddenly your phone rings from your office and your colleagues say that the purchasing department did not receive the latest invoices from our FTP Location. Later, BizTalk administrators open the standard admin console and realize that the Receive location is disabled. In such cases, this can eventually breach your business process.  As a BizTalk administrator, this can take place in many scenarios and what you need to do is simply re-enable the receive location of that particular FTP file location. A few other scenarios could be like when you deploy a new version of a BizTalk MSI, and forget to start all the applications, if any other failures happen in NT Services to automatically get back to the running state after a server patch etc.

BizTalk receive locations

Current challenges – No auto correct support by BizTalk

Unfortunately, BizTalk Server does not provide any in-built functionality to detect that artifacts are in the wrong state, let alone that these artifacts are brought back to the desired state. So, what’s left is creating custom scripts to take care of that task.

User permissions required for auto correct

To enable auto correct, by default customers who enroll BizTalk360 will get access to the auto correct feature. So, if you wish to evaluate our product. Sign up for our free trial.

How it works?

With the auto correct functionality, Administrators can set up monitoring on any “State-based” artifact and let the monitoring service automatically heal the artifact any time. Let’s see how it works!

Whenever a user needs to enable the auto correct feature, navigate to the path as follows:- BizTalk360 -> Monitoring -> Manage Mapping ->Applications-> Receive locations

Firstly, you must create an alarm for the application to monitor. Click here to set monitoring for the application.

BizTalk EDI Application

For instance, Administrators can set up monitoring on the receive locations of an application and additionally set up the auto correct functionality for the Expected state of the artifact (which should be “Started”). Whenever the receive location goes down or gets disabled, there will be a state mismatch and the auto correct will try to bring the artifact back to the Expected State within the next monitoring service cycle (60 seconds).

To know more about auto correct feature. Click here!

State based Monitoring

Artifacts state-based monitoring is one of the important features in BizTalk360. State-based monitoring is included for Application Artifacts

  • Send Ports
  • Receive Location
  • Orchestrations
  • Host Instances
  • NT Services
  • SQL Jobs
  • Logic Apps

To avoid manual intervention, administrators can set up the “Max Retries” count in the auto correct. This would allow the BizTalk360 monitoring service to continuously try and bring back the receive location to “Enabled State”. If the operation was successful within the Max Retry count, the artifact would be automatically healed to ensure business continuity. If the operation was not successful within the Max Retry count, the artifact would move into a Critical state.

Email Notification

The Receive Location is configured for monitoring and auto correct. When the receive location violates the threshold condition, that means that the monitoring service will first trigger the down alert.

The Monitoring service will try to auto correct the state of the receive location to the expected state and trigger an auto correct email.

Free download this blog as a PDF document for offline read.

Alarm Reset Capability

The Auto Correct configuration will get reset in two scenarios. The Auto Correct will get reset, once after the auto correct is successful:

  1. The Auto Correct “Max Retry” counter will be reset after the successful auto healing of the mapped artifacts
  2. Associated Auto Correct mappings will be reset after the alarm reset.

Now, with Auto Correct parameters “Max Retry” and “attempt”, an additional parameter has been added, which is “Reset Interval”. The user can configure the time interval to do automatic Auto Reset. This configuration will reduce the manual intervention every time when the “Max Retry” counter reaches it limit.

BizTalk receive locations

Conclusion

In this first article, we have seen the effective usage of the auto correct feature in BizTalk360. However, we have only scratched the surface of the capabilities, by showing only to enable auto correct feature to get notified when your receive locations are down or disabled. In the upcoming series, we will highlight other highlights as well. If you wish to evaluate our product. Take a quick go by signing up for our free trial.

Happy Monitoring!