Tools for Measuring Performance

The PAL tool is used to generate an HTML-based report that graphically charts important performance monitor counters and generates alerts when thresholds for these counters are exceeded. PAL is an excellent tool for identifying bottlenecks in a BizTalk Server solution to facilitate the appropriate allocation of resources when optimizing the performance of the solution. For more information about the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=98098.

The SQLIO tool was developed by Microsoft to evaluate the I/O capacity of a given configuration. As the name of the tool implies, SQLIO is a valuable tool for measuring the impact of file system I/O on SQL Server performance. SQLIO can be downloaded from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=115176.

Microsoft SQL Server Profiler can be used to capture Transact-SQL statements that are sent to SQL Server and the SQL Server result sets from these statements. Because BizTalk Server is tightly integrated with SQL Server, the analysis of a SQL Server Profile trace can be a useful tool for analyzing problems that may occur in BizTalk Server when reading from and writing to SQL Server databases. For information about how to use SQL Server Profiler, see the "Using SQL Server Profiler" in the SQL Server 2005 Books Online at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104423.

BizTalk LoadGen 2007 is a load generation tool used to run performance and stress tests against BizTalk Server. The Microsoft BizTalk LoadGen 2007 tool is available for download at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=59841.

BizUnit is a framework designed for automated testing of BizTalk solutions. BizUnit is an excellent tool for testing end-to-end BizTalk Server scenarios. For more information about BizUnit 3.0, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=85168.

IOMeter is an open source tool used for measuring disk I/O performance. For more information about IOMeter see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122412.