Manage-System-Alerts-in-BizTalk360

System Alerts and Unmapped Application Artifacts in BizTalk360

Published on : May 9, 2019

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Senthil Kumar

Author

Introduction

BizTalk360 has powerful monitoring features to manage the BizTalk Application Artifacts, Queues, Infrastructure, Health check tools, etc. Most of the customers are using BizTalk360 for its core monitoring capabilities. BizTalk360 is the single tool to manage operational activities, monitoring and analytics of the mission-critical BizTalk environment. In this transforming phase, it is a tedious process for a dedicated person to monitor all the configurations. To address this scenario, System Alert notification is implemented in BizTalk360 v9.0.

Why System Alerts?

Currently BizTalk360 use Alarms to send out the notifications of Application artifacts, queues, Infrastructure settings health of the BizTalk environment. In the same perspective there is need to know the health of BizTalk360, which will helpful to the administrator who takes care BizTalk360. The BizTalk360 Monitoring service will take care of sending system notifications to the configured admin user email boxes. These email boxes can be configured in the system settings. A new monitoring sub service called ‘System Alert’ has been introduced to send system related notifications. System Alerts can be enabled in the System Alert Settings under Monitoring and Notification tab of system settings. A user can configure multiple admin emails with semicolon separated values.

A System Alert notification can be pushed to the admin users in the two ways:

  • Scheduled
  • Automatically Triggered

The BizTalk360 Monitoring service has a polling interval of 60 seconds and it will check for system alerts to be pushed. Either these alerts will be pushed based on a trigger or on a schedule.

NOTE: Custom Notification channel alerts are not applicable for Systems Alerts in this version (9.0).

System Alert Schedules

System Alert Schedules will send periodic reports of unmapped application artifacts. This will be helpful to the BizTalk Operation Users/ Administrators who can take appropriate actions to configure the artifacts for monitoring.

System Alert configuration can be scheduled as follows:

  1. Daily – Daily schedule will push the notification at the specified time in a day for all the days of the week.
  2. Weekly – Weekly schedule can push the notification on the specified day and time in the week (for example, Wednesday, 12 PM)
  3. Monthly – Monthly schedule can push the notification on the specified day and time in the month (for example, the 15th day of the month, 10 AM)

System Alerts Schedule Configuration

Based on the configuration, the Monitoring Service will alert the Unmapped Application Artifacts in the BizTalk Environment. The Unmapped Application Artifacts list will be available as an attachment in the email notification.

Unmapped BizTalk Application Artifacts

The Unmapped Application Artifacts list feature can be used to manage the artifacts which are not mapped to any of the BizTalk360 Alarms for monitoring.

Scenario

It will be helpful for the administrators who are taking care of the application artifact’s health. When BizTalk Developers or a deployment team deploy new artifacts into the BizTalk Group, the BizTalk administrators might not exactly know the newly deployed artifacts. In such cases, the Unmapped Application Artifacts status will provide a warning indication to the administrators/operators.

The status of Unmapped artifacts is shown in the monitoring dashboard. Unmapped application artifacts status will be healthy when all the application artifacts in an environment are mapped to the alarm. It will show the unhealthy status, when any of the artifacts left unmapped for monitoring. “Unmapped Application Artifacts Link” will be listed with the application artifacts which are still unmapped.

Unmapped Application Artifacts

Unmapped Monitor State

From BizTalk360 version 9.0 on, the new Unmapped monitoring status is introduced. This is the default state for application artifacts. Users can set the expected state and start monitoring the artifacts.

NOTE: Users can use the Do Not Monitor state, if they don’t want to monitor an artifact. In such cases, that artifact will not be listed under Unmapped application artifacts.

Automatic Triggered Alerts

When the events or conditions meet the triggering rules, then the alerts will be triggered automatically. System Alerts can be of triggered based

  • BizTalk360 License Expiration
  • Database Sizes (BizTalk Database & BizTalk360)

In this version of BizTalk360, BizTalk360 License Expiration is implemented. Database Sizes triggered notification will be implemented in a future version of BizTalk360.

License Expiration

When your BizTalk360 license is about to expiry, BizTalk360 System Alerts service will notify the license expiration to the admin users. Notification can be sent on the 30, 15, 7, 2 days before the license expiry date.

System Alert History

Click on the ‘System Alert History’ button to view the historical System Alerts. Alert History is maintained for both alert types(Schedule and Trigger). Users can view the system alerts email notification which has been sent to admin users in HTML Format.

System Alerts History

Data Purging

System Alerts historical records are maintained based on the data purging policy of “Alert & Maintenance History”. BizTalk360 will maintain the system alert notification history up to the configured number of days/months.

Based on your requirement you can set the purge duration.

Conclusion

System Alerts notifications will be helpful to BizTalk Administrators to manage the BizTalk Group health and BizTalk360 environments.

Get started with the free 30 days trial. For any queries/feedback please write to us support@biztalk360.com.