At the moment I am involved in migrating BizTalk Server 2009 applications to a brand new BizTalk Server 2013 platform. Most of the systems that BizTalk connects with are placed behind a firewall. To allow communication between those systems and the new BizTalk Server 2013 environment new firewall rules had to be added.

Welcome back to this series of articles about Monitor your BizTalk environment using PowerShell that already have five previous editions:

• Monitor your BizTalk environment using PowerShell – Disk Space Monitoring
• Monitor your BizTalk environment using PowerShell – SQL Agent Jobs Monitoring
• Monitor your BizTalk environment using PowerShell – Suspended instance monitoring
• Monitor your BizTalk environment using PowerShell – Old dehydrated instance monitoring
• Monitor your BizTalk environment using PowerShell – Port monitoring

One of the principal needs for BizTalk Administrators is the ability to monitor the health of BizTalk environments and react promptly to possible problems, you can accomplished this by using certain tools such as: BizTalk Administration Console; BizTalk360; SCOM and many more… However, unfortunately many times, some of these tools are not available for us but we still need to accomplish this task.

All the BizTalk database which is being backed up by the ‘Backup BizTalk Server’ job, so all databases with the exception of the BAM Star Schema database (BAMStarSchema), has one table called “MarkLog”.

These tables are holding all the transaction marks (they are actually timestamps in a string format), set to a specific database, created by the 3th step (MarkAndBackUpLog) of the ‘Backup BizTalk Server’ job. This step, MarkAndBackupLog, is responsible for marking the logs for backup, and then backing them up. So each time this step runs, by default each 15 minutes, a string is stored on that table with the following naming convention:

• Log_<yyyy>_<MM>_<dd>_<HH>_<mm>_<ss>_<fff>

Example: BTS_2014_05_06_14_15_01_327

Unfortunately BizTalk has no out-of-the-box possibilities to clean up these tables. And the normal procedure is to run the terminator tool to clean it up. See also: Clean up the MarkLog table with Terminator

Just a small update on the serie Sandro and I wrote on how to monitor BizTalk with Powershell. In this blogpost you can find a script that generates on alert by sending an e-mail if a send or receive port is down.

BizTalk Server databases and their health are very important for a successful BizTalk Server database messaging environment. BizTalk is shipped out with a total of 13 SQL Agent jobs that perform important functions to keep your servers operational and healthy.

Like any other system, all BizTalk Server databases should be backed up and BizTalk Server will provide out-of-the-box a job for accomplished that: Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb) job.

This job makes both Full and Log backups. By default the Backup BizTalk Server job performs a full backup once a day and performs log backups every 15 minutes. This means that once the full backup is performed you need to wait 24 hours for it to automatically do another full backup of the BizTalk Server databases… even if you try to manually run the job, it will only make the backups of the log files.