Saravana Kumar at the Dutch BTUG

21 June 2011

I’m very happy to announce that Saravana Kumar has accepted my invitation to speak at the upcoming BizTalk User Group (BTUG) meeting in Almere on June, 29th. Saravana will talk about and demo BizTalk 360.

Saravana has been working with BizTalk Server since the first product release early in 2001, and has many years experience in architecture, design, and development of mission critical systems focusing mainly on Microsoft Technologies. He worked as one of the Lead BizTalk Server consultants in the National Health Service (NHS) project in UK for 3 years, one of the biggest public sector projects in the world and largest implementation of BizTalk Server 2004.
He is very passionate about upcoming Microsoft technologies. In year 2005 he won the Connected Systems Developer competition under MCP category for designing and building SQL Service Broker Management Studio 2005.
Currently, Saravana is an independent consultant focused solely on Microsoft based integration solutions using BizTalk Server. Microsoft published his white paper Understanding Design-Time Properties for Custom Pipeline Components in BizTalk Server.
Saravana is awarded "Most Valuable Professional (MVP)" for BizTalk Server every year since 2007. Finally Saravana owns and maintains the BizTalk 24*7 community site.

This is your chance to hear and meet one of the top international BizTalk community members. You can register here.

3 Comments | BizTalk | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

BizTalk 360

7 June 2011

I assume anybody in the BizTalk space would have known BizTalk 360 by this time. I though I’ll just give my view of the product here.

BizTalk 360 tries to address some of the real challenges we face on a BizTalk environment, especially controlled environments like Production and Test environments. There are 3 core features I personally like about BizTalk 360

Governance/Auditing: This is such an invaluable addition to the tool, on a controlled environment it’s very important to know “who did what”. There were so many instances in the past, where we struggle to identify who stopped the host instance or who Unenlisted a send port etc. With BizTalk 360 we’ll know exactly who did that activity.

Fine Grained Authorization: This allows controlling the user’s access to the environment in a fine grained manner. It helps us reuse the environment by multiple departments/projects, without the fear of one interfering with other resources. We also don’t need to provide direct access for users to access the physical machines.

Topology: We got multiple environments with multiple configurations. In the past when we need to understand the network topology we either need to login to the server and work out BizTalk/SQL server configurations. But with BizTalk 360, it just dynamically plots the network diagram.

The great thing about it, there is a free version as well. The free developer version got pretty much all the essential things that will be useful for development purpose. The only downside I can see is, BizTalk 360 reached the market bit late. If this product was available 3 years ago, I’m pretty sure by this time every reasonable sized company would have got one. But late is better than never.

The commercial editions are also priced reasonably given the amount of functionality it got. I personally know Saravana Kumar, the fellow Microsoft BizTalk Server MVP who is one of the founders of BizTalk 360. I will hugely recommend anyone using Microsoft BizTalk Serer to take a look at BizTalk 360.

1 Comment | BizTalk | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

Artikel over BizTalk en PowerShell

2 November 2010

nederlandse-vlag

Dick Dijkstra en ik hebben een artikel geschreven over BizTalk en PowerShell. Het artikel is recent gepubliceerd in de gedrukte versie van TechNet magazine.

Het artikel is helaas nog niet online beschikbaar.

 

Note to international readers of my blog:
The above post is aimed at the Dutch community and therefor only published in Dutch language. Unless you want to learn Dutch you can safely ignore it (I realize that is probably true for all my posts). Smile

2 Comments | BizTalk, PowerShell | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

Monitor BizTalk Server Job in BizTalk 2010

19 October 2010

When looking a the new features of BizTalk 2010 I noticed that the set of SQL Server Agent jobs has been extended. There is new job called ‘Monitor BizTalk Server’.

new sql job

This job is especially good news for those of us responsible for keeping BizTalk Server running and healthy.

The general idea behind the job is to check for errors and report that those errors exist in one of the message box databases, the management or the tracking database. A zombie message is an example of an error that will be detected. For a complete list of all the issues see the BizTalk 2010 help on this topic

The job consists of two steps. The first step is responsible for collecting error data from the different message box databases, the management database and the tracking database. The second step checks the collected data and raises an error if there is an issue in of the databases.

job steps

If any inconsistencies are found the job will fail and will write an error to the application event log. You can easily extend this by configuring other notifications for the job like e-mail, etc.

job notification

The job does not fix any issues it is just provides an alert mechanism. You can other tools like the BizTalk administration Console to fix any issues found.

When running the job on a healthy BizTalk server environment, the job succeeds:

job success

Now I use the following non uniform sequential convoy orchestration to generate a zombie message:

orchestration

I can easily do this by throwing in message 2 (destination receive shape 2) multiple times. The orchestration is only expecting one instance of message 2 which will lead to a zombie message. In the admin console this looks like this:

admin console error

When running the job the second time I now see the following result:

job outcome error

The job history gives me more detailed information of what is wrong:

error job history

This information is also in the event log:

eventlog error

Some final considerations:

  1. By default the job is scheduled to run once a week. You can of course change this schedule if you like.
  2. This seems to be a heavy job in terms of SQL resource usage. Microsoft recommends to run the job during low traffic.
  3. The will not detect if issues have already been reported. When the job runs for the second time and the issues have not been fixed they will be reported again.

I think this is a useful new feature in BizTalk Server 2010. I have seen many clients where issues in the BizTalk databases where not noticed for a long time.

4 Comments | BizTalk | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

Do you know this BizTalk Admin Console feature?

16 September 2010

This is probably not my most ‘appealing’ post but I thought I mention it anyway. I recently discovered the ‘Hide property schemas’ feature in the BizTalk Administration Console.

You can right click in the schema view and select ‘Hide property schemas’. It is obvious that after enabling it, the deployed property schemas are hidden from the view and you get an overview of only the ‘regular’ schemas.

I was not really shocked by this feature. To be honest I think it is not really useful (at least not for me). I was more fascinated by the fact that it appears there are still features I don’t know in the console while I work with it every day.

Did you know this feature? For readers that did not and who think it is not useless, see the screenshots below.

In BizTalk 2006 R2 Admin Console:

image

In BizTalk 2009 Admin Console:

image

In BizTalk 2010 (beta) Admin Console:

image

In BizTalk 2010 the Admin console now has a action pane which makes the feature more visible.

Anyone other “obscure” features that are not generally known?

2 Comments | BizTalk | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Randal van Splunteren

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