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).

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When it comes down to keeping the BizTalk environment up and running, the BizTalk administrator holds the key position within a BizTalk team. The BizTalk administrator’s role and responsibilities are focused on keeping the BizTalk environment healthy. He/she works according to the procedures in a pre-defined support model. Another aspect is tooling. A BizTalk Administrator needs to be well trained, skilled and knowledgeable. He/she will also need the right tools to do the job. In this post I like to discuss the tooling a BizTalk administrator can use for him/her to more be proficient in his/her job.

I think some of you are aware of the new features and enhancements to Windows Azure that were announced last Thursday during "Meet Windows Azure" event in San-Francisco. One of the new services Microsoft is offering in Windows Azure are Virtual Machines. You can now create Virtual Machines in Windows Azure the same way as you would on your laptop, desktop or server using Hyper-V or VMWare. The Virtual Machines in Azure are durable, meaning you can install anything within them and it persists across reboots. It also allows you to use any OS on them like Windows 2008 R2, 2012 RC, Linux ...

My first book written by myself is ready to be published. At the end of this month the BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook will be available throughout the world. It took a year to complete this book filled with over 50 recipes. Recipes that even BizTalk administrators will appreciate as at least two or three chapters are targetted towards them. They will recipes on monitoring BizTalk, using PAL, the BizTalk BenchMark Wizard, BizTalk MessageBoxViewer, BizTalk Deployment Framework, and configuring the vital BizTalk components like ESSO and MSDTC.

A two weeks ago I wrote about the flying start this blog has made. Now this blog has double in number of posts from fourteen to twenty eight. I must say that is amazing and the number of bloggers has grown to eight; myself, Jeroen Hendriks, Lex Hegt, Sandro Pereira, Howard Edidin, Peter Winther, Joris Arts and Miguel Angel Castaño. You can find them in the bloggers section of this blog. It is not just this blog that plays an important role in the momentum BizTalk Administration, but also the TechNet Wiki. You can read my latest blog post there, where I also tell story on BizTalk administration.

BizTalkadminsblogging has had a tremendous start. Within a week and a half 13 posts already and this will be number 14. This is an average of almost two blog posts a day. This reflects the high demand for BizTalk administration related information, the need for sharing it and desire to create more exposure for this aspect of BizTalk Server. Jeroen and Joris have done an excellent job setting up this blog site, running and maintaining it. The recent posts have touched topics like PowerShell, Microsoft Operation Framework, and so on.

A new blog site on BizTalk Administration is born. Why? BizTalk administrators have a strong urge to share their knowledge with each other. The BizTalk community is strong and shares an incredible amount of knowledge through blogs, wiki's, presentations and other channels. Yet the focus is strong on development and less on administration. Development is cool and very popular. Is administration dull and less appealing?