Best Practices for Monitoring

This topic provides best practices for monitoring your Microsoft BizTalk Server environment and applications.

Create and then implement a monitoring plan for your BizTalk applications and infrastructure

• Read the monitoring topics in this guide to ensure a more complete monitoring solution. Factors to consider include the following:

  • Who will perform the daily, weekly, monthly, and as needed monitoring tasks?
  • Is someone notified of events, suspended messages, or other system or application failures?
  • Are "expected" exceptions filtered or given a lower priority?
  • Are all host instances monitored to ensure they continue running?
  • Are all custom services, custom event logs, and custom databases monitored?
  • Are the SQL Server computers and the BizTalk Server SQL agent jobs monitored?

If possible, install a monitoring application such as Operations Manager 2007 to automate the monitoring of your BizTalk Server applications and infrastructure

• Using Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is the preferred approach for automated monitoring because the BizTalk Server management packs provide hundreds of built-in rules for BizTalk Server.

  For more information, see the following resources:

  • System Center Management Pack for BizTalk Server 2020
  • How to Mark BizTalk Server Databases for Customized Monitoring

Run the BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer

• The BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer examines a BizTalk Server deployment and generates a list of issues pertaining to best practices standards. The tool performs configuration-level verification by gathering data from different information sources, such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, SQL Server databases, and registry entries. The data is then used to evaluate the deployment configuration. The tool reads and reports only and does not modify any system settings, and is not a self-tuning tool.

  You can download the BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer.

Run the Performance Analysis of Logs tool (PAL)

• PAL is available as a free download at https://github.com/clinthuffman/PAL. For important installation information, see Using the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool.

Run Log Parser

• Log Parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows® operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory®. You may want to use this tool to query a significant amount of logging information. You can download the Log Parser tool.

Run the BizTalk MsgBoxViewer Tool

Run the BizTalk MsgBoxViewer available in the BizTalk Health Monitor. This tool analyzes the BizTalk MessageBox and other databases and generates an HTML report containing warnings, if any, and other information related to the databases. You can also save the reports for later use. These reports might be useful when troubleshooting issues with the BizTalk application.

If the BizTalk MsgBoxViewer tool identifies any issues, run the Terminator tool, also included in the BizTalk Health Monitor. This tool enables users to easily resolve any issues identified by the BizTalk MsgBoxViewer tool.

Make monitoring a priority

• Consistent monitoring of BizTalk Server applications and infrastructure is essential to maintaining a healthy environment.
• Regularly evaluate and adjust your monitoring tools over time and as your BizTalk Server applications and infrastructure change.