Saravana Kumar

BizTalk Innovation Event, Milan, Italy | May 24th

saravana — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:11:53 +0100

Overnet Education in collaboration with Microsoft Italy and User Group Italiano Connected System has organaised one of the biggest BizTalk event in Italy.

All thanks goes to Nino Crudele (fellow Italian BizTalk Server MVP) for taking the effort to organise the event. It's not a easy task by no means organising a community activity (FREE) of this magnitude bringing international speakers. Big thanks to Nino for organising this.

If you are somewhere near by (Sweden, Norway, UK or any European destination), it will be a worthy while day to network with some of the great guys in BizTalk community.

The agenda for the event:

BizTalk Host thresholds and automatic throttling
by Tord Glad Nordahl;

BizTalk360
by Saravana Kumar (MVP BizTalk Server)

Adapter Pack Integration Capabilities (BizTalk)
by Steef-Jan Wiggers (MVP BizTalk Server)

Introduction to the Azure Service Bus EAI/EDI features
by Sandro Pereira (MVP BizTalk Server)

BizTalk Innovation Event Wrap up
by Nino Crudele (MVP BizTalk Server)

Click here to ensure your registration or to get more information?s about this event.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

Published BizTalk Monitoring best practices white paper

saravana — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:05:07 +0100

Today we published a white paper explaining the importance of BizTalk Server monitoring and Top 15 best practices your can follow to get your monitoring story correct.

Read the complete article BizTalk Monitoring - Top 15 Best Practices in our official BizTalk360 blog.

Hope you enjoy it, please feel free to add your views as comments.

Nandri

Saravana Kumar

BizTalk Backup-Disaster Recovery - Log shipping is the only official option, why?

saravana — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:18:50 +0100

When it comes to BizTalk environment "Backup and Disaster recovery", the only official supported option is Log shipping.

This applies to all the versions of BizTalk Servers listed below

BizTalk Server 2004 SP1, 2006, 2006 R2, 2009 and 2010

Log shipping was originally introduced in BizTalk 2006 and back ported to 2004 via SP1. MSDN article contains very good resources, explaining the steps involved in setting up and restoring BizTalk databases.

Microsoft story on BizTalk Server backup/restore has never changed for the past 6 years. When it comes to disaster recovery there are 2 standard industry terms people refer to

Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

RPO is the amount of data loss acceptable for business, and RTO is the amount of time it?s acceptable for business without a live environment. With BizTalk Server log shipping default settings, these values will be RPO value of 15 minutes (transaction log back up interval, which can be altered), and RTO will be approximately 1 hour.

Depending on your system volume and amount of background noise it can tackle, you can experiment with reducing the transaction log back up time from default 15 minutes.

Why Log shipping, not any other methods?

BizTalk Server uses multiple databases as part of its runtime requirement. These databases need to be transactionally consistent (including DTC transactions) at any given point of time to ensure integrity of the server.

As part of this solution, BizTalk uses Marked Transactions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa577848(v=bts.20).aspx) that guaranties the transactional consistency for all of the databases included in the backup. As part of the installation/configuration, BizTalk creates a SQL Agent Job that uses SQL log shipping for providing backup/recovery of its databases. The backup/restore solution is implemented as an external SQL artifact and is not a native functionality/feature of BizTalk server. The server runtime only expects availability of its databases in a consistent state and does not make any assumptions about the backup/restore mechanism. The task of securing a backup and restoring the database in a transactionally consistent state is assumed to be an external activity.

What's Microsoft stand on alternate solutions?

If you use BizTalk Server with any 3rd party database solutions other than Microsoft SQL Server Log shipping for backup/restore, your primary support contact is the third-party solution provider for any support issues that are related to this. BizTalk Server was developed and tested by using Microsoft SQL Server Log shipping. The Third-party solution provider should be your primary contact for any installation issues, performance issues, or backup\restoration issues. CSS provides commercially reasonable support for BizTalk server related issues as long as it is not related to the back\restore functionality provided by the 3rd party solution.

Generally, support for any SQL specific 3rd party solutions are within the scope of support as outlined here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913945

What does the above mean?

Microsoft as a software vendor provides an out of the box solution for BizTalk backup and restore. If you are choosing a third party vendor or custom crafting something for your own benefit (ex: avoiding the extra SQL server instances required for Log shipping). Then the risk is either with you or with the third party vendor to restore the data/environment back. If in case you can?t restore your DR site using a third party solution, then simply don?t call Microsoft support.

If you look at the SQL server case, there are dozen third party vendors who supply backup/restore tools for SQL server. If you use any of them and you can?t recover the data, then logically you call the third party vendor helpline or sue them, rather than calling Microsoft.

Unfortunately for BizTalk server there are not any third party solutions available that can certify and take the risk. So you are left with Log shipping.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar
Founder - BizTalk360
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BizTalk360 first anniversary

saravana — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:03:31 +0100

In UK we got a policy of shifting the bank holidays that comes in the middle of the week to following Monday, so people can have an extended weekend. Last year's 1st May bank holiday was shifted to 2nd May, on that day we released our very first version of BizTalk360 CTP to public. Today is 7th May, alternative to 2012's 1st May holiday.

We introduced BizTalk360 with a very powerful tag line "Worlds first BizTalk production support and monitoring tool". We clearly understood, being first doesn't mean anything (Google is not the first search engine, iPOD is not the first MP3 player and Windows is not the first GUI OS to give few examples). It's all about innovation and constant improvement that either makes or breaks the product.

In the following chart we summarize our improvement over the last 1 year. We release 4 major versions in the past 1 year. We simply didn't increase the version number for every simple updates, each version came with substantial functionality that ease the life of BizTalk administrators and support people in a day to day activity.

	v1.0	v2.1	v2.5	v3.2	v4.0 BETA
Release Date	May-11	Aug-11	Oct-11	Feb-12	May-12
Features
1	Web based console
2	Application management
3	Advanced Authorization
4	Governance/Auditing
5	Topology
6	BAM Portal
7	Query Instances
8	Advanced Event Viewer
9	Dashboards
10	Platform Settings
11	SQL Instance view
12		Monitoring/Notification
13		Clustered Host Instances Handling
14			Knowledgebase
15			Role based Security
16			Message Box Viewer Integration
17			Monitoring/Notification Improvements
18				Graphical Message Flow
19				Throttling Analyser
20				SMS Alerting
21				Tracking Manager
22				Advanced Event View Improvements
23					Custom SQL Queries
24					Monitoring plugin architecture
25					Monitoring Enhancements

In the past 1 year we got customers over 10 countries, covering various industry sectors. Most of the customers are large scale enterprise customers, some of them are well known retail brands. Never thought the shirts I wear and the world famous trainers I use for my tennis (companies) will become my customers one day!!.

I whole heartedly thank every one who helped us to achieve this milestone. All my MVP and community friends, my close family and friends. We haven't paused yet, we already started planning for what's coming after 4.0 (keep tuned).

NOTE: BizTalk360 got it's own blog now, so if you want to keep up to date with product improvements, please subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

BizTalk360 BETA 4.0, with most anticipated features released

saravana — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:29:57 +0100

Yesterday we announced the immediate availability of BizTalk360 V4.0, you can download it and start using it straight away from here http://www.biztalk360.com/Content/beta

Now BizTalk360 got it's own blog, please subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360 to get regular updates on our progress.

One of the major improvements we have made for BizTalk360 v4.0 is extending our monitoring capabilities.

In previous version, customers were able to monitor all the artifacts related to BizTalk Applications (send ports, receive locations, orchestrations, and host instances status) + they can set alerts based on Message box viewer report (when critical or non-critical errors above certain level). But with BizTalk360 v4.0, customers can monitor and get alerted in various areas as listed below

1. BizTalk Applications (simple)
2. BizTalk Applications (Advanced)

Send Ports
Receive Locations
Orchestrations

3. BizTalk Servers

NT Services
Disks
Event Logs
System Resources (CPU, Memory)

4. SQL Instances

SQL Jobs

5. BizTalk Environment

Host Instances
Web Endpoints (WCF/SOAP services, HTTP endpoints)

6. Message Box Viewer

We have written a detailed blog post with lots of pictures showing various functionalities in detail in our new official BizTalk360 blog

http://blog.biztalk360.com/post/2012/05/04/BizTalk360-v40-Beta-Extended-Monitoring-Capabilities.aspx

Now BizTalk360 got it's own blog (http://blog.biztalk360.com/), please subscribe http://feeds.feedburner.com/biztalk360 to get regular updates on our progress.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

BizTalk360 v4.0 BETA available for download - Custom SQL Queries

saravana — Thu, 03 May 2012 06:25:58 +0100

We are very pleased and excited (as always) to announce the immediate availability of BizTalk360 version 4.0 beta. You can download it from here http://www.biztalk360.com/content/beta

The core focus for 4.0 is enhancing the monitoring capabilities of BizTalk360 to infrastructure related things. As a bonus we also included the ability to maintain/execute custom SQL queries within BizTalk360. In this article, we will see the capabilities of Custom SQL Queries and in the next post I'll cover the monitoring enhancements

Custom SQL Queries:

When you are actively managing a BizTalk environment, the BizTalk admin and support people typically maintain a bunch of custom SQL queries as their armour to check the health of the system. You can see some of the good resources here for useful BizTalk SQL Queries biztalkadmin, biztalkadminsblogging, technet. At the moment there is no easy way to maintain those queries, and you always need to access SQL management studio to execute them, and more than that you need to provide permission for users to execute those queries across various SQL instances and databases. We wanted to make this task easy for BizTalk admins and support people using BizTalk360.

We added a new link to our data section called "Custom SQL Queries" in our navigation tree, as shown in the below picture.

Once the user click on the link, "Custom SQL Queries - Report" screen will be displayed. The screen contains a combo box with list of pre-defined SQL queries as shown below. The user (BizTalk360 admin user) will have the ability to add new SQL query, or modify/delete existing queries.

The user simply select the query from the combo box and the result will be displayed in the grid below. Example: In the below screen user selected the query "Sendports NOT Started", which brings all the send ports in the environment that are not in started state, as shown below.

Custom SQL Query management:

BizTalk360 comes with set of inbuilt SQL queries, we are planning to add more queries to the default install over the future releases. BizTalk360 comes with complete query management capabilities. As shown in the below window, BizTalk360 administrators can add new query, modify/delete existing query, using this simple screen.

Benefits of Custom SQL query functionality:

There are few great advantages of this functionality.

1. User can execute the query from single management tool. No necessity for SQL server management studio

2. Central Query repository, that makes maintaining queries easier. No more SharePoint or Wiki

3. The end users (support people) don't need to have access to SQL. The queries will be executed in the context of service account, so only the service account requires access.

4. You can include queries against any SQL instance/Database. As long as the service account got access to them.

In the next article we'll cover the big functionality of BizTalk360 v4.0, extended infrastructure monitoring capabilities.

Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Founder - BizTalk360

BizTalk Administration Special - User group meeting 10th May 2012

saravana — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:25:04 +0100

Finally we managed to secure our next user group meeting on 10th May 2012. We settled for the theme BizTalk Administration Special. In recent month, there are whole lot of traction around BizTalk administration and operations. Guys at BizTalk Administration Blogging (http://biztalkadminsblogging.com/) are doing a great job in promoting the importance of a BizTalk administrators role in an organisation.

Event Information:

When: 10th May 2012, Thursday, between 6:30 to 9:30pm

Where: Customer Meeting Room 05
Microsoft, Cardinal Place
London

Registration Link: http://ukcsugmay2012-eorg.eventbrite.com/

Let me introduce Tord Glad Nordahl. Tord is from Norway, working for Bouvet ASA. He is establishing himself as an expert in BizTalk administration area. He is conducting the famous BizTalk Deep Dive course across the world. He got a dedicated blog for BizTalk Administration at http://biztalkadmin.com I met him few months ago in Netherlands during a user group presentation. We bounced back and forth few emails and he kindly accepted to come and present in London.

We are going to have 2 sessions focused on BizTalk administrations. First Tord is going to focus on insisting developers should keep BizTalk Administration in mind while building solutions. Next I'm going to present BizTalk360 (http://www.biztalk360.com ) and show how it can improve the efficiency of administration, operations and monitoring side of BizTalk environment. Both the sessions will complement each other.

London user group is special for us, this is where we announced for the first time in public about BizTalk360 exactly a year ago (http://ukcsbugmay2011.eventbrite.com/). It's one year on, with 3 major releases (v1.0, v2.5, v3.2) and the fourth one coming end of May.

Please register for the event if you are in/around London. We guarantee it will be worth while of your time.

BizTalk360 Live Webcast - Current State and what's coming in vNext

saravana — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:38:20 +0100

We released version 3.2 of BizTalk360 on 7th of February with bunch of interesting features. Straight after that we merged ourselves on the our 4.0 version which is due to be released end of May.

Live Web Cast : 18th April 2012. Details and registration can be found here.

The main focus for 4.0 version is to expand BizTalk360 existing monitoring capabilities to other core infrastructure related areas like disk space, NT services running state, SQL jobs running state, system resources like CPU, Memory, Event Log patterns etc.

The other important thing we included in 4.0 is a plug-in architecture, monitoring sections can be written in isolation and can be plugged-in into BizTalk360 core monitoring system. These is super useful for customer who got very specific monitoring requirements. Example: One of customers want to do some sequence of steps,

1. Get a value of the element in the config file using xpath,
2. Check the database for some relevant value based on the previous config file value.
3. Alert if the database value is not expected value.

In the past BizTalk customers always got some custom in-house solution to do these kind of things. But now you can easily create such custom monitoring in BizTalk360 and make it part of your overall monitoring solution.

Why not SCOM Monitoring?

There is no question an enterprise monitoring solution like System Center operation manager(SCOM), HPOpenview or something equivalent can do these kind of jobs, but there are some real practical challenges.

1. They are complex products in themselves, and requires considerable knowledge to set it up

2. They are general purpose monitoring products and they look heavy and complicated for some of the basic scenarios

3. It's often time consuming to setup SCOM or HPOpenview in an organisation, which could range from weeks to months.

With BizTalk360 our focus is to to concentrate only on Microsoft BizTalk Server related areas. We try to keep it as simple as possible. Our focus is to setup BizTalk environment monitoring in few minutes or hours, NOT days, weeks or months.

Come and join our BizTalk360 Live Webcast on 18th April 2012, and check for yourself what we have to offer. We are doing two session on the same day to cover east and west time zones. The details of the event and registration can be done here.

Nandri!

Saravana Kumar

BizTalk Server 2010 Cookbook

saravana — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:23:35 +0100

I love this concept of cookbooks; they follow the same concept as your kitchen cookbook, bunch of recipes to prepare a fancy meal.

You are never going to sit and read all the recipes in one night, you are going to keep the book as reference and follow the recipe you fancy.

Technical cookbook got similar characteristics. There are various recipes, you pick the one that's more relevant to the piece of work you are doing. Short, Sweet and up to the point.

This new cookbook from Steef-Jan Wiggers consist of over 50+ BizTalk recipes, covering various proven design patterns, best practices, or simply showing you some tips and tricks you never come across.

I personally know Steef-Jan very well and know about this book project for a long time. In fact I was chosen as one of the technical reviewers for the book, but had to pull out due to my commitments with BizTalk360.

Writing a book is not a easy task, most of these guys don't do it for making money. It's their passion and interest in technology that drives them to write such valuable books sacrificing a great deal on their personal life.

With the effort that's gone into this book by Steef-Jan over the last year or so, I'm fairly confident it's worth every penny.

Readers Digest Scam

saravana — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:18:13 +0100

Normally I don't write non technical stuff in my blog, but becoming a victim of the scam by one of the reputable house hold magazine puts me in this position. I'm a great fan of Readers Digest, I love their magazine. But they killed everything and lost a fan by one simple scam.

I'm taking my valuable time to write this post in the interest I can save few innocent people from unethical companies like this. It's a real shame a company like Reader Digest using their customer base, with some psychological tricks to get money out of.

From my experience this is how the scam looks like:

You will receive series of letter from Readers Digest well drafted and look very personal with your name addressed (example picture attached) in various places and you'll feel as if you are one of the few chosen candidates. The credibility of the magazine and the price money will be lucrative enough for you to take part.

The bottom line of the process is to force to sell you something, that's absolutely of no use or some dead stock they wanted to get rid off.

The process won't be a simple reply card, they will ask you to do some funny things like sticking a golden sticker from somewhere in the letter to the envelope, they will force you to complete the process ASAP by putting pressure on the reply date (normally 7 days). They will provide 2 different envelopes one with "Yes" and one with "NO". If you don't want to purchase anything, you need to post your reply in 'Yes' envelope.

It's basically the process to trap people somewhere down the line. They may be running this competition legally, but it's all about psychological tricks to trap innocent customers.

I'm fairly confident I haven't sent a 'Yes' reply back (but it's hard to prove), but received a book this morning with a bill attached asking to pay ?18.98 (image attached). I called the provided number and got the impression the person is well trained to handle it. The shocking thing for me, there is no option for you to return the book, the guy said "You need to pay for it, since it's already been ordered, only thing they can do is stop any further letters and orders". I'm not sure how it will work with customer statutory rights, but I don't have time to raise a fight against them. So I paid the money and asked them to cancel everything including the subscription. Hope this will help one or two.

-Saravana Kumar