BizTalk terminate suspended instances

BizTalk360 Automated Recovery Features – Part 5 – How to Automatically Clean up Unneeded Service Instances

Published on : Apr 29, 2021

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Christhini

Author

Introduction

This blog post is about how you can automatically clean up unneeded service instances without any manual intervention. This blog comes as part of a series of 5 that all discuss different topics around how to effectively benefit from the Automated recovery features of BizTalk360.

Free download this blog as a PDF document for offline read.

Operational Automation – Why do we need this feature?

Let us consider a scenario

If you are a BizTalk developer or an administrator, you would have experienced this! If you have Suspended (Non – Resumable) service instances in your environment, ideally that kind of messages should be cleaned up (terminated) automatically

But you are supposed to log in to the admin console and query them periodically by yourself.

Current challenges – No automatic support provided by BizTalk Server

Unfortunately, the BizTalk server does not provide any automation method to clean up such unneeded service instances. In order to have a healthy and safe BizTalk environment, it’s important to keep an eye on the runtime service instances and message instances in your BizTalk environment. So, what’s left, BizTalk administrators need to manually open the BizTalk admin console and take necessary actions against them to take care of the task.

User permission required for access

To enable automated cleanup, by default customers who enroll in BizTalk360 will get access to the Message Box Data Monitoring. So, if you wish to evaluate our product. Sign up for our free trial.

Using MessageBox Data Monitoring to automate processing

Users can configure queries to monitor the service instances and receive notifications whenever the system detects a violation based on the configured threshold values. Configure the MessageBox schedule in BizTalk360 as follows:

Navigate to: Monitoring -> Data Monitoring -> MessageBox Data -> Add new

Automate your actions against the Service Instances – Operational Automation

Based on the checkbox selected, Is Action Required checkbox, BizTalk360 enabled you to automatically perform the below tasks:

  • Terminate
  • Suspend
  • Resume

You can define an action such as “Whenever there is a Suspended (Non – Resumable) service instance in the environment during the configured monitoring time range, the system can take automatically terminate them.

Note: Actions could be a great tool to automate your routine tasks like regularly resuming or terminating service instances. But be cautious about enabling it since some of the actions performed by the BizTalk360 cannot be undone.

When you select the “Terminate” action, you will notice the “Archive message content & context associated before terminate” checkbox. Selecting the checkbox will automatically back up the service instance details to a folder and then terminate the instance. See the below “Archive and Terminate Suspended Service Instances” section to configure the archive location.

In the MessageBox Data Monitoring, you can act against the services based on,

  1. Only Query result count (no date/time filter)
  2. Query result with date/time range

Only Query result count (no date/time filter)

Whenever users select this option, this will execute the query without applying any date time filter it means that all the data will be considered for SQL query execution.

Based on Query result with date/time range

Whenever users select this option, this will apply the Creation Time filter for SQL query execution.

The values configured for setting trigger time, Set Monitoring Times -> At What Time, will be used for the Creation Time filter

For example: When Monitoring frequency is set for an hour, then every execution of the query will consider only one hour of data.

Once the MessageBox Data Monitoring is created and configured in your environment, it will execute during the specified time intervals. Based upon the configured threshold values, if the volume doesn’t meet then immediately BIzTalk360 will trigger an alert. Such alerts can be transmitted by means of so-called Notification channels.

Currently, BizTalk360 offers custom notification channels for the following:

  • Microsoft Teams
  • Slack
  • ServiceNow
  • PowerShell
  • SMTP
  • WebHook

Click here to know more about the notification channels.

Free download this blog as a PDF document for offline read.

Conclusion

In the fifth article of the series, we have seen how to setup monitoring for your suspended (Non- resumable) service instances and take automatic action (terminate) on the service instances immediately. You will be notified in your preferred way of communication when violations happen in your environment. BizTalk360 has all the cool features with which you can maintain a healthy BizTalk environment. If you wish to evaluate our product or take a product tour. So why not give it a try! Take a quick go by signing up for our free trial. Our dedicated product consultant team will provide you a free demo.

Happy Monitoring!