Regular vs Threshold Monitoring alarms in BizTalk360

Published on : Feb 6, 2013

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Saravana

Author

In BizTalk360 you can setup monitoring in two different modes, either to receive regular periodic updates about the health of the system or updates based on threshold violations. Example: A receive location is disabled, that’s supposed to be enabled.

Regular Alarms

Regular alarms are like your daily early morning wake up calls. You are fast asleep and you wanted to get up at 6am. Whether it’s raining outside or warm, you want your alarm to kick off and wake you up. That’s exactly how the regular alarms in BizTalk360 works. In spite of the environment health condition, whether its health or unhealthy, it will send you a notification  (email). Your environment may be completely healthy, but still you wanted to get a notification email with all green bars showing things are fine. This is especially useful for environment owners, who is responsible for healthy functioning of a BizTalk environment. create new alarm The sample REGULAR alarm email will look as shown in the below picture. The environment owner can add whatever sections he/she is interested in like Application artifacts (receive locations, send ports, orchestrations etc), or Infrastructure details like disks, NT Services, Event Logs, CPU, Memory etc. It basically provides peace of mind to the environment owner to see everything is green and if there are any issues, that can be actioned quickly. Note the subject line of the email will clearly say, it’s a REGULAR ALARM with the name of the alarm (ex: summit demo) biztalk applications monitoring

Threshold Violation Alarm

As you can see on the screen below there is a simple knob you can turn ON to enable threshold violation monitoring and alerting. For threshold alarm there is no set time period (like days and hours), BizTalk360 monitoring service continuously monitor the health of the system based on the configuration and send notifications as soon as it detects any violation conditions. setting threshold alarms With Threshold alarm there are some fine grained settings the user can configure. Persist Duration : In Minutes. This settings allows the monitoring service to wait for set number of minutes (ex: 20 minutes) before triggering the notification. This avoid sending notifications too quickly. Some issues could be intermittent and may resolve automatically. Restrict number of alerts: You can either configure the alarms to keep sending notifications (indefinitely) or you can restrict it to set number of notifications (example: 5). This avoids annoying users with too many emails, when you know there is a problem. Notify when things become normal: This is very useful, when there is an issue and someone is working on it, the user obviously will be interested in knowing whether the problem is resolved. Enabling this switch will do the job automatically. The notification email will look identical to REGULAR alarm, but the subject line will either say DOWN or UP depending on the nature of the notification. The user have complete control on alarm definition. They can use only Regular Alarm, or only Threshold Alarm or both.

Advanced Settings

Advanced Settings is optional and it’s common to both REGULAR and THRESHOLD alarms. As shown in the below picture it allows to configure advanced notification settings like SMS, HP Operation Manager console notifications and you can event write it as an event with specific Event Id in windows Event viewer (useful if some other monitoring system need to pickup and process the condition). advanced settings for notifications