New Features and Resubmission Filters in ESB Portal

BizTalk360 is designed for BizTalk monitoring and supporting Microsoft BizTalk Server environments. There are few common problems most of the BizTalk server customers face and BizTalk360 tries to address them. On every new release we come up with new features and improvements for the best user experience Likewise in version 10, we entirely migrated the pages for a clear and concise UI and with exciting new features ahead.

Key takeaways from this blog

1. Importance of ESB in BizTalk360 v10.0
2. How to handle exceptions in BizTalk Server 2020
3. How to use BizTalk ESB Exception Management portal
4. How to Configure ESB in BizTalk Server 2020
5. ESB Dashboard
6. What’s new in ESB portal?
7. Resubmit bulk messages
8. Why Resubmission filter?
9. Enhancing Resubmission in ESB portal
10. Conclusion

Importance of ESB in BizTalk360 v10.0

One of the tools which come with BizTalk Server is the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Toolkit. The most interesting thing in ESB Toolkit is the Exception Management framework.

How to Handle Exceptions in BizTalk Server 2020

Typically, when a message is processed, and something unexpected happens, you will end up with a Suspended Service instance. To proceed with such Suspended Service instance(s), a BizTalk Administrator needs to log in to a BizTalk server, query the standard BizTalk Admin console and see if the message can be resumed. However, sometimes a message contains wrong information and needs to be fixed.

So, two major functionalities that are missing in the standard admin console are

• Visualizing failed messages in a web portal for easy access
• The ability to edit/resubmit failed messages.

The problems which have been highlighted above are solved by BizTalk360 via the ESB Portal.

Note: To use ESB, kindly ensure that you have Licensing Tier either Gold or Platinum

How To Use BizTalk ESB Exception Management portal

BizTalk Server comes with its own portal for exception management. However, as of BizTalk Server 2020, you cannot install the ESB portal from the BizTalk Server 2020 installation media.

In case you want to understand how to install the ESB portal with BizTalk Server 2020, read more here:

How to Configure ESB in BizTalk Server 2020

For several years, you can also access the ESB Exception Management framework via the portal that we have developed in BizTalk360. With the BizTalk360 ESB Portal, one can start viewing exceptions right in the user interface. No need for any complex web services installation to fetch the exception information.

One can use ESB Portal to,

1. View the exception details – In a single click, user can view the exception information – Fault Details, Exception Details, and message information.
2. Edit & Re-submit messages – Whenever there is a fault in the ESB Exception Management portal, users can choose to rectify the fault by editing the message and resubmitting it back to a particular receive location.
3. Bulk Submit of Messages – Select multiple messages in one go and bulk submit them to a specific receive location. This is an added functionality in BizTalk360.
4. Download and Email Messages – You can download the message context and content information as a zip file as well as email them to your team members for debugging purposes.
5. Security – With BizTalk360, you can set up access restrictions at user level to restrict them from being able to submit/resubmit messages. That’s just not it! You can also restrict the right of the users to edit the messages or not before submitting them to the respective receive location. Without these permissions, users cannot perform any operations on the ESB Portal exceptions.
6. Auditing your actions – If you care to know who did what in your environment/what operations an user from your administration team performed on the exceptions, that’s where BizTalk360’s governance/auditing module comes to your rescue. With full governance and auditing capability, BizTalk360 maintains the log of activities your users perform on the ESB exception messages.
7. Integrated Knowledgebase – you can associate a Knowledgebase article with known exceptions

Note: To access ESB Portal, Configure ESB under Environment Settings in BizTalk360.

ESB Dashboard

ESB Dashboard will allow users to aggregate ESB reports into a single graphical dashboard. There are 13 widgets in total that will help users understand their ESB integrations and to better analyse the data to improve performance. You can customise ESB dashboard by adding different kinds of widgets, which are,

1. ESB Fault count (based on application, service or error type)
2. ESB Resubmission
3. ESB Itineraries

What’s New in ESB Portal?

“The goal of user experience design is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”

In that way we completely changed UI in this version such that the user will find it more comfortable to use when compared to the previous version.

Resubmit Bulk Messages

Users could select the faults for which they wanted the messages to be resubmitted and click on Resubmit. Messages would then be resubmitted in the order, same order they were thrown as exceptions.

Why Resubmission Filter?

Let’s consider a scenario,

For example, say if your organisation does not have any technical expertise (BizTalk Administrator) to use ESB. In that case BizTalk360 comes into action where you can ask your business users to support BizTalk solutions (ESB) and make your task much easier.

• Easy Configuration
• Less time consuming
• Querying for Fault messages
• Quick Action against Bulk/Edit/Resubmit messages
• Resubmit Successful filter to filter out resubmitted messages

In the previous version, we had to check the Message Details of each individual fault to see if it had been resubmitted or not. And on each refresh, there may be lot of faults in the results. So, it is tough for the user to track all the resubmitted faults. So, in version 10.0, to make things easier, we now have a grid level notification for resubmitted messages, and we can use the Resubmit Successful filter to filter out resubmitted messages.

Enhancing Resubmission in ESB Portal

One of the new features added is identifying the Resubmitted message in grid. This might help the user to track Resubmitted Fault by just looking to the UI.

The new Filter named Resubmit Successful has been added to the key List. This feature would help the user to filter out the Resubmitted Message Results separately in the grid which is the other new . ESB is not available in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 and hence BizTalk360 v10.3 would be a great choice to use this feature.

Once selecting the Resubmit Successful in key List and true value in value List sorts out the Resubmitted Message Results in the Grid.

Conclusion

By bringing the ESB Exception Management portal within BizTalk360, we eliminate the need to use the sample ESB portal that comes with the toolkit. As BizTalk360 is a replacement for the ESB Portal. On every new release we bring out something new to ESB Portal which would be beneficial to the user. In this version, we brought out the concise UI and gave specialisation to Resubmission Filter and Notifying Resubmitted message in grid. With these features we think that we have brought another good feature to the product, taking away the need to use the out-of-the box features, while empowering the users with relevant other features.