BizTalk Server Tip #3: BAM Lightweight Tracking

Use BAM as a lightweight tracking mechanism, by disabling default tracking and enabling BAM activities on a message flow you can reduce the performance impact of tracking. BizTalk default tracking takes an all or nothing approach and using BAM you can decide exactly what needs to be tracked. When BizTalk default tracking is enabled BizTalk is collecting information on a lot of different places. All service instances are being tracked for start and finish, orchestration specifically are being also tracked for message send and receive as well as shape start and end. This amount of tracking is considerable and can be increased by activating message body tracking or promoted properties tracking. And while you have the option to disable this type of tracking you don’t have an easy way to control how extensive its. Using BAM to do tracking gives you the opportunity to track exactly what you need, you can define your tracking schema (activity) and what you map to be tracked (tracking profile). The BAM Infrastructure also give you the ability to define your purging and partitioning criteria allowing you to control how much data you retain and also OLAP cubes can be created to better analyze the tracking data. Read more on How to replace Tracking with BAM in BizTalk.