In the last two chapters we went through the main tools and procedures that we can use to be up to date about how our environments are behaving. A system administrator is in a better position to react against a potential outage when has all the information possible about the issue as soon as it happens. But yet having all the information at hand, we will still have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and find the root cause of the problem before being able to come up with the right fix.

In the third chapter we learned about System Center Operation Manager R2 (SCOM) and seen some scenario’s. SCOM is a great product for monitoring your entire enterprise infrastructure. Yet it may be overkill to use SCOM for just monitoring a BizTalk group itself. Or when you do not intend to use an enterprise monitoring system like SCOM for monitoring BizTalk you may have look for alternatives.  

The goal in this chapter is to focus on third party monitoring tools and products available in market and through the community (CodePlex).

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

After the release of chapter 1 - Backup and Recovery  and chapter 2 - High Availability, we are now releasing chapter 3. In this chapter we learn all about  Monitoring BizTalk 2010 and why it is a critical task for BizTalk Server Administrators. We will learn about:

• The need for Monitoring.
• The use of System Operations Manager 2007 R2  (SCOM) to monitor our BizTalk Environments.
• Step through a few scenarios using SCOM to monitor BizTalk.
• Using the Windows Server Event Application Logs.
• Advanced Tracking Techniques using the BAM Portal and the BizTalk Administration Console Tracking.
• EDI and AS2 Monitoring

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

In the first chapter we learned about Backing Up and restoring our BizTalk Server 2010 environments. In chapter 2 (written by Andres Del Rio Benito and myself) we will untangle the complexity of implementing High Availability. The prime goal of high availability is to minimize downtime.

In order to achieve high availability for our BizTalk Environment we will learn about the following topics.

• High Availability and the Microsoft Operations Framework
• Host separation and multiple host instances
• High availability setup of BizTalk both virtual and physical setup
• Setup of handlers in a high available environment
• Third-party clustering and virtualization platform

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

The first chapter has been written by Howard Edidin and myself. It is all about Backup and Recovery. A good backup and recovery strategy is key to keep essential data safe and recover quickly after a disaster. The chapter has the following goals.

• We will discover that Backup and Recovery is a Team effort.
• We will learn about the steps involved to create a proper Backup Plan.
• We will learn about the types of Backup Storage available.
• We will discover open-source tools that will help you implement your backups.
• We will learn how to recover from a Disaster.
• We will walk-thru actual Backup and Restore scenarios provided by some of your peers.

You can download the pdf below or by clicking here.

For quite some time now Andres Del Rio Benito, Howard Edidin and Steef-Jan Wiggers have been working on a book called Microsoft BizTalk 2010 Administration Essentials. This book is about (you guessed it) BizTalk administration. It talks about all relevant topics that every BizTalk admin should be concerned with. After some rounds of technical reviews done by Ben Cline, Sandro Pereira and myself the book is now ready to be published.

I am very happy to announce that the writers choose BizTalkAdminsBlogging.com as a platform to publish their book. We will be releasing a new chapter every two or three weeks.

I often perform BizTalk health checks for my customers. One of the checks I do is to see if they are using software that is still supported by Microsoft. I do not think it is per definition wrong to use software that is out of support. It is however a risk that they should know about, so that they can accept the risk or resolve it.

I had a discussion with some of the other bloggers (Sandro Pereira, Lex Hegt, Steef-Jan Wiggers and Tord Glad Nordahl) on this website about initial file sizes for BizTalk databases. This discussion was based on the following article:

http://www.biztalkadminsblogging.com/index.php/item/66-checking-database-autogrowth-settings

Yesterday I was performing a Health Check at a client. One of the checks is looking at the database autogrowth settings. In the operations guide Microsoft states the following about the BizTalk database autogrowth settings:

Pre-allocate space for BizTalk Server databases and define auto-growth settings for BizTalk Server databases to a fixed value instead of a percentage value

One of my clients asked for an easier way to stop and start BizTalk applications. I created a PowerShell script with a Windows forms GUI. You can use it to stop or start all host instances and or IIS on a server in a BizTalk group.