What is coming in v9.0

Published on : Mar 19, 2019

Category : BizTalk360 Update

saranya

Author

 BizTalk360 enhances the complex administrative tasks into a modern easier task. We always aim to constantly improve our product based on our customer’s feedback and their business needs. We have recently released V8.9.5. The upcoming version 9.0 features are typically chosen from our customer feedback based on the impact and the number of requests.

You asked and we are implementing the below features for v9.0.

Alarm Auditing

When we work on cutting edge technology, security is one of the important factors we always need to consider. Keeping that in mind, earlier we implemented Governance and Auditing which actually audits BizTalk level activities from BizTalk360. You can think of actions on BizTalk Applications, Service Instances, BizTalk Host Instances, BizTalk and SQL Servers, ESB Messages and Business Rules.

Many customers requested us that it could be great if Biztalk360 activities such as Alarms, User access policy activities also audited. So, for this release we have implemented Alarm activities. Alarm operations such as new alarm creation, deleting an alarm, changing the alarm status (Enable/Disable), editing alarm details will be audited with the existing and new values, along with the user details. With this, the administrator will get clear picture of all the alarm activities.

Also, we have taken Secure SQL Query auditing. If any query has been created or modified this will be audited. We also implemented auditing of the ‘Execute’ operation. So, with this administrator can easily look for, who has executed which query and which parameter value are passed for the query execution in detail.

 

SMTP Notification Channel

In BizTalk360 version 8.0, we introduced Notification Channels. With this , it’s easy to send alerts to any external systems like your ticketing system, internal databases, calling REST endpoints or executing PowerShell scripts.

To add more value to this, we are bringing the SMTP Notification Channel which provides an ability to create an email distribution lists by grouping email ids based on the business needs. The monitoring service will generate a notification to a group of people by simply configuring the recipient address (To, CC) in the channel. Once the SMTP notification channel is configured it can be used in all the alarms just, by enabling the channel. This will prevent the user to type email ids over and over again.

UnMapped Artifacts List

When the artifacts are mapped for monitoring, BizTalk360 will take care of it and intimates users when any violation occurs. But, what happens if you missed to map some artifacts for monitoring? You will not get any notification for this, right?! Of course, we don’t want you to miss artifacts for monitoring.

This  problem will be solved in v9.0, you will get a summarized list in the Monitoring Dashboard. This list contains  the status of the artifacts which has been mapped for monitoring and also the unmapped artifacts list. For instance, if any new artifacts have been added in your BizTalk environment, we will bring that to your notice and you can easily map the artifacts for monitoring. Also, we will forward the list of unmapped artifacts to the system administrator based on the configured interval time.

 

Switch User Roles

 

As of now in BizTalk360, once a user profile is created, the user roles (Super, Normal) cannot be modified at any point. To change the user roles, the profile needs to be deleted and recreated again which is a time-consuming process. This will be solved just by editing and changing the user roles. So Super Users can quickly be converted to Normal users and vice versa in a single step.

Copy to Clipboard

Our business data is highly valuable. The information uses contains decision-making and problem-solving. From v9.0 we are providing an option to copy your information’s in a single click from  the BizTalk360 UI to the Windows Clipboard.

 

Apart from these new features, we are working on improvements in the following sections.

 

Monitoring Dashboard

The BizTalk360 ‘Monitoring Dashboard‘ becomes the one-stop point for support people to view the health status of BizTalk environment. We have planned to do some changes on monitoring dashboard UI which helps you to see the summarized dashboard in much enriched view.

AutoCorrect reset

In BizTalk360 we have the Auto Healing functionality with which, if your artifacts go down, the system will try to auto heal the violation. The system will retry the auto healing process for a configured number of times. Once retry limit is reached the auto healing process will be stopped.

In v8.9.5 we introduced the auto reset option for the auto healing process, in which, after the configured interval time, the retry count will be reset to 0 and starting the auto healing process again. We kept the “interval time to reset the retry count” to 0. This means that the retry limit will never reset, unless the user goes and manually change the interval time. This is quite a tedious process when you have huge number of artifacts mapped for auto healing.

This problem will be solved as we will provide an option to define the default interval time globally. So once you update the interval time it will be used for all the artifacts.

Conclusion

Considering the feedback from our customers, BizTalk360 will continues to provide more useful features. Now we would like you to hear from you, so please take some time to fill this questionnaire to help us prioritize the next upcoming feature tasks. Stay tuned for next version v9.0.

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