BizTalk360 GitHub Project

Introduction

BizTalk360 is the one-stop tool to manage operations, monitoring and analytics of your BizTalk environment.  Over 80+ features in the product bring all the BizTalk Tools like EDI, ESB, Business Rules, BAM, and the BizTalk Health Monitor. It is a matured product with these features included of which there have been 50+ iterations of product updates. User Access Policies with governance audit (Security), Operational Tool Integration, Monitoring, and Analytics are among the BizTalk360 core capabilities. BizTalk360 has brought important business scenarios into the product like:

• Auto-healing of BizTalk Artifacts
• Automated actions on Suspended Instances
• Process Monitoring and Data Monitoring

 These capabilities make BizTalk360 the must-have tool to manage the BizTalk Server.

Customization in BizTalk360

BizTalk360 has provided solutions to common Integration scenarios (BizTalk, Azure). In addition to the above-mentioned features, BizTalk360 has provided the opportunity to integrate custom solutions into the product through:

• Custom Notification Channels
• Custom Widgets
• Create Alarm Tool

Custom Notification Channels and Custom Widgets are bundled into the product, during the major update of v8.0.  Users are taking advantage of these features, by customizing alert notification to their preferred channels and visualize their important data in BizTalk360 Dashboard through Custom Widgets.

The source code of such customized solutions (Notification channels, Widgets and Alarm Creation Tools) is available in our GitHub Project.

Users can utilize the source code to create new customized solutions or extend their existing solution to meet their business requirements.

Users can commit their solutions into BizTalk360 GitHub which will benefit other users who follow this channel.

Custom Notification Channels

Custom Notification Channels provide a platform to send alerts to an external system, like your ticketing system, internal databases, calling a REST endpoint, executing a PowerShell script, etc. If you want to know how you can create, customize and configure new or existing custom notification channels, read this article.

 BizTalk360 has out of box solutions for the following Custom Notification Channel:

• ServiceNow
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Webhook
• PowerShell Notification
• SMTP Notification

Users can create their own customized solution for their ticketing systems rather than ServiceNow or trigger activities (PowerShell) based on their business needs. We can see some of the use cases that users can take by customizing the notification channels:

1. ServiceNow – Customers can extend the BizTalk360 ServiceNow notification channel to add more fields to meet the business process
2. PowerShell Notification – Users are utilizing this capability to trigger actions when monitoring conditions are violated
   

   • Start/Stop Host Instances

   • Terminate dehydrated service Instances

   • Terminate messages after X number of days

   • Manage Maintenance mode during BizTalk Deployments

3. Microsoft Teams – Enhance the Microsoft Teams notification channel to include a message card
4. SMTP Notification – Users can improve on default notification by using the SMTP Notification Channel to configure Up, AutoCorrect Email separately.

The source code in the GitHub project can be pulled, customize the code to meet your business scenario and then configure it in BizTalk360 to be able to use your custom solutions.

Custom Widgets

Custom Widget is a powerful feature by which users can take advantage in BizTalk360. Customers can integrate their business process flows by using Custom widgets. This allows integrating solutions with BizTalk360 own API’s, as well as third-party API’s (like SalesForce, Power BI, Azure, etc.) and database queries by using the Secure SQL Queries.

Use Cases:

1. Business Process – Few customers are integrating their business flows using their internal API’s and created custom widgets by which business users take advantage of BizTalk360 dashboard integration
2. Graphical Representation – Visualize the reports in Solid gauge using High Charts, which is available in BizTalk360
3. Consolidated View of Monitoring Dashboard – Users are able to customize their monitoring dashboard to a single view, by grouping type of monitors
4. Secure SQL Query – This provides the opportunity to pull data from other databases into the BizTalk360 dashboard through Secure SQL Queries
5. Monitoring Status– Many of our users are using dashboards to monitor their business flow integrations. They can create a custom widget and pin it to a dashboard to monitor the integration. You can think of showing the following:

   • Errors & Warnings of an Alarm in a Grid

   • Last Date Time of Errors & Warnings

   • Web Endpoint Monitoring status of an integration

   • Number of Suspended Instances in an alarm

   • Number of messages processed in an application

6. Monitoring SQL Jobs – SQL Jobs are monitored through BizTalk360 API’s by creating a custom widget

Alarm Configuration

Another example of running third-party executables is the creation of BizTalk360 alarms. Normally, you’ll have to do this manually after each deployment of a new or changed BizTalk application. This too can be a time-consuming and error-prone task.

By using BTDF and a tool called BT360Deploy, you can automate the creation of alarms during the deployment of your BizTalk application.

In complex BizTalk environments, creating Alarms and mapping artifacts to monitor is a tedious process. To overcome this challenge, our Technical Lead (Lex) has written an article to configure BizTalk Artifacts for monitoring through the Alarm Creation Tool. In that article, he explained how the BizTalk Deployment Framework (BTDF) is integrated with BizTalk360 Monitoring.

Conclusion

Users can take advantage of custom solutions using Custom Notification Channel, Custom Widgets and Alarm Creation Tools.  Customers get the maximum benefits out of BizTalk360 when creating custom solutions.