Introducing BizTalk360 v8.9.5

Published on : Jan 31, 2019

Category : BizTalk360 Update

saranya

Author

We always aim to constantly improve our product based on our customer feedback and the business needs of our customers. Keeping that in our mind, we add some significant features in every single release.  In this blog, you can get to know about all the stimulating features we have shipped in our latest v8.9.5 release.

Quick Alarm 

Are you new to BizTalk360?  Now you can easily setup monitoring, just in a Single click by using a Quick Alarm.

The Quick Alarm feature has been brought into the product to give a unified experience to the user to easily set up monitoring. A Quick alarm is a consolidated alarm which selects a few artefacts from the BizTalk Applications and map them for monitoring, under various categories (Threshold, Data Monitoring, Health Check) .

Quick Alarms can be configured from Monitoring Dashboard and from Manage Alarm section just by providing the alarm name and email id. This configuration also takes care of SMTP setup if you have not yet configured it in your environment. So once a Quick Alarm has been configured, you will be notified through email if any monitoring violation happens.

Send Port Group Operations

One of the powerful features in BizTalk Server is Send Port Groups, which help to route a single message to more than one destination.Send Port Group operations and monitoring is one such important feature we did not yet include in BizTalk360. At a point, we received a feedback from one of our customer “As they were not able to fully start/stop the applications from BizTalk360 when they have Send Port Groups configured ” .Hence, we have taken it for v8.9.5.

Now, you can perform operations such as start/stop/enlist/unenlist the Send Port Groups from BizTalk360. With this new capability it is possible to manage the operation of BizTalk applications (Start & Stop) for all the artifacts of each application  in BizTalk360. This implementation makes the life easier for the BizTalk support engineers without context switching between BizTalk admin console and BizTalk360.

One of the main objectives for us from the security perspective is auditing. We have leveraged the governance and audit capability to capture all the activities of Send Port Groups performed by all the users within BizTalk360.

Send Port Group Monitoring

From the latest version, you can completely manage and monitor your Send Port Groups from BizTalk360. Create an alarm, map the Send Port Groups for monitoring by setting up the expected state. If any threshold violation occurs, you will be notified. You can also setup auto-healing for this monitoring; once the Send Port Group goes down, then BizTalk360 will try to auto heal it to the expected state.

Alarm Auto Reset

We allow users to configure number of alerts to be triggered within stipulated duration if any threshold violation happens . When the configured alert reaches it limit ,it cannot be reset unless if the threshold violation resolves or user reset it manually .This is an impacting issue for some customers who monitor several artefacts under same alarm .In this scenario, when artefact 1 goes down, you will get notified with down alerts on periodic interval based on your configuration. Later no further notification will be sent when any other artefact goes down , since the number of alerts has already reached its maximum count .This problem is now resolved with the Alarm auto reset functionality, in which the alert counter will automatically reset after configured time. So, there is no chance of missing alerts when your artefacts are going down.

Auto Correct Reset

Auto healing is one of the dominant features available in BizTalk360. When you configured auto correct for your artefacts, the system will try to always maintain the expected state which you have set for those artefacts. When the artefacts state changes then the system tries to bring it back to the expected state. Here, the maximum retry is based on user configuration. So, what happens when it reaches the max retry count? It will not try to auto correct the state. To overcome this problem, we have introduced a new capability called Auto Reset. From this version on, the retry count will get automatically reset as per the user configuration (e.g.: 10 mins).

So when you configured Auto-healing for your artefacts, it is guaranteed the system will always try to maintain the expected state without any downtime with this new capability.

Delete ESB Fault Message

With the ESB Fault Delete functionality, you can delete the fault messages which are not important for resubmission.

Let us consider this scenario, a send port that you are using in your application fails unexpectedly, therefore both the service instance and the message become suspended and the fault information is written into the ESB exception database. Once the exception is corrected and resubmitted for further go, there may be two scenarios which will come into picture:

  1. Messages which are submitted successfully are residing in the ESB Exception database and are of no further use.
  2. Messages are rerouted to the ESB Exception database due to recurrent failure. In this specific case, the original message also available in the ESB portal.

In BizTalk360, we have introduced a new option “Delete” to clear the messages which are not required anymore. Additionally, all the deleted activities are audited in both Governance & Auditing and Live feed section to ensure the security.

Custom User Profile Templates

When we work on cutting edge technology, security is one of the important factors we always need to consider. When a new user is created, you can provide access to the corresponding features based on the roles of the user. Consider a scenario where the customer would need to provide similar permissions to multiple users. It could be very time-consuming to make the changes for every user. BizTalk360 made this process very easy for the users by introducing the capability to create custom profile templates. You can create a custom template with the desired features selected and choose the template while creating the users.

Few Enhancements and Bug Fixes

Besides these new features, we have also brought a number of enhancements and bug fixes.

Filter Operators Improvements

BizTalk360 has the capability to query the data from various databases to show important data such as Service Instance details, Tracked/Message service details, ESB and so on. To filter the data from the corresponding database, BizTalk360 provides rich Query Builder capabilities. From this version on, we have added few additional operators in line with the BizTalk Admin console for easy access to the data in both the Operation and Data Monitoring sections.

Notification Channel Improvements

 Associated Alarm

 Imagine a user wants to know about the mapping of a specific notification channel out of all the configured alarms in the environment. This was a tedious task in earlier versions of BizTalk360.

To get the quick status of the notification channel association with Alarms, we brought the new option “Associated Alarms” in the Setting side, to view all the mapped alarms in a single view.

DLL Reconfiguration

There was no option to reconfigure the notification channel, if any changes were made in the existing notification channel DLL. You need to go and change all the properties in all the alarms where the specified notification channel is mapped. Now, the reconfiguration process will be seamless from the UI without touching the database.

License Expiry Reminder

To provide an insight about the type of license and date of expiry , License expiry notification will be shown in UI for all the license types (Commercial, Partner & Product Specialist).

We have closed around 24 support tickets as part of fixing the issues in different areas. Please refer the Release Notes – https://docs.biztalk360.com/docs/v8951122201

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Conclusion

Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments. Get started with the free 30 days trial.