Introducing-Send-Port-Groups-for-Monitoring

Introducing Send Port Groups for Monitoring in BizTalk360

Published on : Dec 6, 2018

Category : BizTalk360 Update

BizTalk360

Author

At the moment, we are working on release v8.9.5 of BizTalk360 and we are excited to blog about a new feature which introduces Send Port Groups Monitoring.

One of the most powerful and overlooked features in BizTalk Server is Send Port Groups, helps to route a single message to more than one destination. A Send Port Group is a collection of send ports that BizTalk Server can use to send the same message to multiple destinations in one configuration. Now, you can monitor Send Port Groups in BizTalk360.

Customer Feedback

As you already know, Monitoring is the core functionality of BizTalk360. With this functionality, you can monitor all the BizTalk artefacts except the Send Port Groups in the earlier versions of BizTalk360.

In BizTalk360, we aim at improving the product and adding new features based on customer feedback and business scenarios. The Feedback portal is one such platform for the customers to provide their suggestions, which can be voted upon by other customers if they feel that these ideas fit in their business requirements as well. It’s based on the priority of voting; the features and enhancements get picked up for development. One such feedback was Send Port Groups monitoring on BizTalk applications.

Customer Feedback for Send Port Group Monitoring

Hence, we have chosen Send Port Groups monitoring for one of the features in this release.

Send Port Groups Monitoring in BizTalk360

Send Port Groups is a “key” feature of BizTalk Server’s “Publish and Subscribe” architecture, where a publisher can have more than one subscriber.

User Scenario: Let’s say you need to map an inbound XML document to three different outbound formats and send each outbound document to a different system. All that’s required is a Send Port Group and a simple Filter Expression. The Send Port Group handles the Filter Expression with each Send Port using its own map! If any of the three transmissions fail, you can resubmit the failed message without resending the other two documents. The user may have one or more Send Port Groups. It can be hard to monitor your Send Port Groups manually. Now with the support of BizTalk360, you can monitor the Send Port Groups easily! In BizTalk360, we have included the Send Port Groups for monitoring for each BizTalk Application. The user can monitor the Send Port Groups by mapping with the alarm as below.

Alarm Mapping for Send Port Group Monitoring

The Send Port Group can go down for some situation; you can monitor the artifact in such situation by configuring the expected state in BizTalk360. When the current state is not equal to expected state, the user will get notified through an alert, as shown below.

Email Template for Send Port Group Monitoring

The same error and status will be displayed in the Monitoring dashboard and in the Errors and warning section as seen below.

Alarm Dashboard for Send Port Group Monitoring

Errors and Warning for Send Port Group Monitoring

Auto Healing functionality for the Send Port Groups

By any chance, when the Send Port Group artefact goes down for some specific reason, you need not to log in to the BizTalk server to make it up again. BizTalk360 Auto Correct feature will get it back to the expected state automatically with the Auto correct option. For this, the user needs to enable Auto Correct for the configured Send Port Groups.

Auto Correct for Send Port Group Monitoring

If in case the system is not able to Auto Correct Send Port Groups to its expected state i.e., when all the attempts to auto correct have failed, then the user will receive a down alert. For each attempt, the user will get notified with the detailed status information of auto correction operation that has happened on a Send Port Group. With this information, the user can get a clear picture of what is happening with the state of the Send Port Group.

User Scenario:  In BizTalk, the user cannot Start or Stop the Send Port Group from “unenlisted’ state when all the associated Send Ports are in “Unenlisted” state.In such scenario, there is a chance that the auto-healing may get failed to heal the Send Port Group from the “unenlisted” state to expected state and the auto correct attempts will get failed since the associated Send Ports gets “Started” or “Stopped” state.

Once all the maximum attempts failed, then the user will get intimated through down alert as “Maximum auto corrects attempts have been exhausted”.

Intelligent auditing

 BizTalk360 has very good intelligent auditing capabilities that will help administrators to find out “Who did what in the environment”. When the auto-healing is successful, it gets tracked at the Send Port Group level under “Application Activities” in Governance and Auditing section.

Auditing the Auto Correct for Send Port Group Monitoring

Live Activity Recorder

BizTalk360 has excellent Live activity tracking feature which helps you to govern user actions efficiently without compromising on regular activities. You can view the Live recording of all the user activities through the “Live Feed” on each successful auto healing of Send Port Groups. 

Live Feed - Auto Correct activity for Send Port Group Monitoring

This feature will be available in our upcoming release of BizTalk360 v8.9.5. Stay tuned to monitor and maintain the Send Port Groups easily through auto healing functionality.