How to monitor your disks in BizTalk Servers?

Published on : May 18, 2012

Category : BizTalk Server

Saravana

Author

Monitoring disk spaces in your BizTalk Servers

Your BizTalk application may be utilizing your local disks for variety of reasons. Whether your BizTalk solution is utilizing the local disk or not, it’s generally a good practice to monitor the disk, so that it doesn’t run out of space. With BizTalk360 disk monitoring plugin, we made this task super simple for you. It’s just a three steps process
  1. Create an Alarm
  2. Configure your expected disk free space warning/error level
  3. Start getting alerts, when the free space goes below threshold
Let’s quickly show you, how you can do it.

1. Create Alarm

Go to “Monitor and Notify” tab and click the button “Create Alarm”. The screen as shown in the below picture will popup. image You only need to configure couple of values and leave most of them default. Specify a friendly name for your alarm, let’s call it “Disk Health Alarm” Alert the threshold conditions based on your requirements or leave it to default values,
  • How long the system should wait for the condition to persist before sending alerts (This helps to avoid getting false alerts for intermittent fluctuations)
  • How many alerts your want?
  • Do you want notification, when the issue is corrected
Configure your expected disk free space warning/error level Under the “Monitor and Notify” tab, navigate to  “BizTalk Servers” and expand. It will display all the BizTalk servers in the Environment (BizTalk Group). image Once you click on the required server, the following screen will be displayed. image There are various plugins for BizTalk Server as shown above (Event Log, System Resources, NT Services and Disks – as of v4.0), for this article we are going to see on Disks. You simply select the alarm to which disk thresholds to be bound. In our case we are going to choose “Disk Health Alarm”, set the appropriate warning and error level and click “Save Changes” image BizTalk360 disk plugin will verify the condition and will give the health feedback straight away in the UI. To demonstrate the functionality, let’s change the warning and error levels to push it into threshold states. image image 3. Start getting alerts, when the free space goes below threshold In addition to the status displayed in UI, BizTalk360 will also constantly monitor your disk configurations and whenever it violated the condition, based on your alarm threshold settings (the one we created in step 1) it will send you email/sms alerts. image image When you got multi server environment, you can configure various levels to different BizTalk Servers, and the email will have a consolidated summary. BizTalk360 is designed to reduce noise (number of alerts) and also on the basic principle of  keeping things simple.