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.

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.

In my last post I demonstrated how we could use PowerShell to monitor disk space. In this post I will explain how you can be able to monitoring SQL Agent Jobs in your BizTalk environment using PowerShell.

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: is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) that you can use to manage and monitor BizTalk Server, and that you can use to deploy and manage your BizTalk Server applications.
• BizTalk360: that provides a nice user friendly interface to monitoring and supporting your BizTalk environments
• SCOM (System Center Operation Manager) that can provide comprehensive monitoring for Windows systems and with the additional of BizTalk Server 2010 Management Pack, SCOM can offer also monitoring capabilities for BizTalk artifacts and BizTalk-related platform components.
• Many more…

However, unfortunately many times, some of these tools are not available for us but we still need to accomplish this task.

So how can PowerShell help us?

System Center Operations Manager is one of the popular monitoring tools for monitoring IT infrastructures (including BizTalk Server). Since there are so many IT-organizations using this product I wanted to give you a heads-up that the mainstream support for SCOM 2007 ends on the 10th of July 2012. If you have SCOM 2007 R2 your good for another two years till the 8th of July 2014.

For more information see:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/bb497976

Over the years we have seen so many common challenges in an enterprise environment when it comes to BizTalk environment day-to-day operations. Here are the top 7 challenges, we have seen.

1. Remote Desktop access to physical production servers

2. Ability to start/stop BizTalk artifacts, Host Instances, Service instances without any audit trace

3. Access to production SQL server instances

4. No or minimal monitoring of BizTalk environments

5. No idea whether your environment is working optimally or throttled heavily

6. No read-only access support

7. No way to isolate application data in a shared environment

In below sections we will explain a bit about each section and see how BizTalk360 can help address all these old practices.