A new month, a new version, even during the summer months!
Kovai Ltd, or better known as the company behind BizTalk360 has released a new version of their web based support, monitoring and analytics tool for Microsoft BizTalk Server.
The goal of BizTalk360 is to address common challenges and make it possible to offer application support for non-BizTalk people. As well as giving your business a great insight of the magic data flowing through your integration platform.
Community edition?
I call this version the community edition, since there are a lot of new features and improvements which were posted on their feedback page.
BizTalk360 and the team behind it, really listen to their community.
New features
BizTalk360 8.5 is packed with new features, the most important features and fixes can be found below.
The complete list of their new features and enhancements can be found on their 8.5 release note page.
Monitoring Host Throttling
As of this version, it is possible to monitor host throttling. Any type of host throttling can be monitored based on the counters we know from other features such as file monitoring.
In order to activate this feature, go to Monitoring -> BizTalk Environment -> Host Throttling
In the screenshot below, I’ve added a throttling condition for the BizTalkMSMQReceiveHost and it will warn me when there is process memory throttling for more than 5 minutes.
Email templates
Finally you can customize your email template in the way you want it! And of course, this can all be done by writing XSLT templates.
This feature can be great if you want to present your business custom templates with links to the application info, or add some KPI’s or just give a short description per application.
The template can be altered in the Settings -> Monitoring and Notification -> Manage Email Template
You get one template by default. And this template looks great.
If you don’t like it, you can create your own template or copy the existing template and just configure it the way you like it. (Don’t forget to validate the XSLT and save it all)
Below you can find a screenshot of the option on the alarm setting page
BizTalk Server Availability
It can happen that your server starts responding slowly or loses network connectivity or just crashes. With the BizTalk Server Availability Monitoring you can be notified on time.
Just go to Monitoring -> Manage Mapping -> BizTalk Server -> Configure BizTalk Server availability and start by selecting your infrastructure alarm and configure the settings.
Integration Accounts
This option is a part of the Hybrid Integration story and makes it possible to access the view of your different artifacts like schemas, maps and certificates.
You can reach this new feature in Operations -> Azure Services -> Integration Account
A more detailed view of the available schemas. You can even view the content from BizTalk360.
Enhancements
No BizTalk360 is complete without some enhancements on the already available features.
Web Endpoint alert notification
The returned message when the alarm meets its failure condition is now improved.
The endpoint name, violation and response time are now visible in the validation error.
File location with directory size monitoring
It is now possible to monitor the file count and the directory size with the feature “File Location Monitoring”.
Other Enhancements
Below are some other improvements which are available in version 8.5
- Data monitoring alerts are not anymore limited to email alerts but can also use the custom notification channels such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.
- The event log error description is now also available in the notification.
