Is there any free tool for monitoring BizTalk applications remotely? [closed]

Question

whether command line or GUI, I'd be interested in testing every of them.

Answer 1

Your question is very generic and all the answers above assumed various things. When it comes to BizTalk monitoring its means different things to different people. Your BizTalk administrator might monitor the overall health of the BizTalk environment by opening the BizTalk Administration console. BizTalk Admin console allows adminstrators to deploy and mange BizTalk applications, in addition it also allows to monitor the health of the running systems. He/She can query for things like running instances (Orchestration, Messaging), suspended instances (resumable/non-resumable), Failed routing messages, failed subscription messages etc etc. BizTalk admin console can also be accessed remotely from a different machine if you have installed BizTalk Admin bits while installation via a MMC snap in.

Apart from this you also have HAT (Health and Activity Tracking in 2006, not in 2009 onwards), which allows you to do certain monitoring. But to access HAT you need to be on any one of the BizTalk machines.

Next comes BAM, which will require some custome configuration or in some cases some custom coding based on your requirements to capture some runtime monitoring data.

Next you got various performance counters, which will give you lot of statitical information like number of orchestrations running inside the host instance, spool size, number of messages received/send, etc etc.

I didn't find any necessity to go for a third party software for any of my monitoring requirements.

HTP Saravana Kumar BizTalk Server MVP.

Answer 2

If you want to monitor what a BizTalk application is doing, you should use Business Activity Monitor (BAM). BAM allows you to track fields from messages or context, and track milestone shapes in orchestrations. There's a BAM training kit here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc963995.aspx

Answer 3

you can always use the smtp adapter to send failed messages to yourself. also performence counter is a great way to monitor biztalk - there is a lot of very useful data there.

Answer 4

BizMon

There is an new BizTalk monitoring tool called BizMon. You can check that out here. I think it does what you like.

We use this for our three mid-sized BizTalk environments (~50 BizTalk application in each) and it works good for us. But you can try it for yourself. The tool is free up to 5 applications (if you're however monitoring more applications than that you'll need a license).

FRENDS Helium

Another tool that might be worth a test is FRENDS Helium. I haven't tried this myself but they have a beta one can request and try out. Don't know anything about pricing or things like that though.

Answer 5

Do you mean monitor the status of each app? The only monitoring tools I know of are the ones from Microsoft here

If you want to monitor what the Biztalk app is doing, you'll need to put logging code into the app itself and then monitor the log (database table, event viewer, etc).

Answer 6

If you want to monitor the number of orchestrations being executed per second bu an application, or the number of messages going through a port, you can use Performance Monitor (perfmon). When you install BizTalk Server, a large number of new performance counters are installed.

Answer 7

If you want to be notified when a BizTalk application starts and stops, you can use WMI. Check into the sample WMI scripts included in the documentation for more info.

Answer 8

For performance monitoring, you can use PAL (http://www.codeplex.com/PAL). You can also use the Message Box Viewer to analyse the health of your system. And one other tool that I found recently and seem quite coold is the BizTalk Documenter (http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkDocumenter). It is a must have in the tool box of any BizTalk developer.

Answer 9

Minotaur has gained a lot of ground in the past year as an effective BizTalk monitoring tool. It is easy to install and setup and inexpensive. Visit Raging Bull Tech's web site to investigate Minotaur as a fresh alternative to some of the product in the market today.

Minotaur V2.0 is set for release end of January 2011 and if feedback from the BETA testing is anything to go by, it is set to take the market by storm.

If you wish to put an end to your monitoring problems, go with the best in BizTalk monitoring out there, Minotaur.

Answer 10

You can take a look at http://sourceforge.com/projects/biztalkmonitord <- opensource FREE biztalk monitor! Including SMS warnings, and live feed monitor, works great for us!

I've its not the easiest to setup (but when its down nothing can compare!)

The best is that its multi -environment firendly

Monitor includes: Specific fileshares Suspended and active message in an environment Suspended and active messages in an application Receive Ports, Send Ports and Hosts + built in powershell commands to restart them! Free space on fileshares!

cheers, and good luck!