Hurray, it’s time to upgrade your BizTalk360 version!!!
We are excited to launch version 10.2 of BizTalk360. We mostly focused on product stabilization this time, where we have added improvements to an existing feature, addressed production bugs, and we also introduced a couple of new features. Let’s see a brief view of each new feature and enhancement we added for this release.
Auditing is such a crucial part of any enterprise software. Let’s imagine an integration scenario of picking up purchase orders from an FTP location and sending it to the SAP system. In this scenario, the administrator can knowingly or unknowingly stop or disable the ports which causes business impact of not processing the purchase orders. In such cases, you must have the system in place to look at the audit logs and see who performed such activity and take the necessary steps.
Before Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020, the admin console did not even haave auditing. However, with the BizTalk Server 2020 admin console there is no clear UI to view the auditing, as the audit data will be stored only in the database. The BizTalk Server 2020 Audit Log integration that we introduce in BizTalk360, provides a platform to view the consolidated BizTalk activities in the BizTalk360 Governance and Audit section. Further, you can even export the audit logs which are captured.
To use this feature, you first need to enable auditing in the BizTalk admin console under BizTalk Group settings. Then, configure the auditing activities that need to be captured in BizTalk360. Operations which are performed on Applications, Send Ports, Receive Ports, Receive Locations, Orchestrations, Resources, and service instances are captured in BizTalkMgmtDB à bts_auditlog table. The Monitoring service will populate the data from the bts_auditlog into the BizTalk360 Auditing table. Collected Audit log is listed in the BizTalk360 audit section.
BizTalk360 already supports an access policy for alarms at a high level; whoever is having access to the Manage Alarm section can create/edit all the alarms. Now it’s updated more granular with alarm specifics, where Superusers can define which alarm can be accessed by which level of users. Say, for instance, if an alarm is created only for support intimation and you don’t want that to be accessed by other users other than the support group, you can restrict it now.
With this implementation, Normal / NT group users can view the alarms and their details in Manage alarms, Dashboard, Group dashboard, Manage Mapping, Data monitoring, Notification History, and Governance & Audit sections only if they have access to those alarms.
Here comes another handy feature, searching an artifact in an environment is one of the common day-to-day activities that admins will do for various reasons, like to make sure that no artifact is in the wrong state or to check the artifact’s configuration, etc. This is like a cakewalk for admin users with the BizTalk360 search artifact feature with rich querying capability where you can filter and act on a single screen. Further, you can see the properties of certain artifacts by clicking on the eye icon.
This feature is now strengthened to save the queries which are used to filter the artifacts. This query is easily accessible to all the users who have access to the saved query. With this, you can search the artifacts with a single click. Also, the query results can be pinned to the dashboard as a widget for quick access or visibility.
The NT service Monitoring checks the status of a service on a BizTalk or SQL Server machine and alerts the user if the state is not as expected, it also attempts to correct the state if auto-correction is enabled.
We have stretched this feature to monitor the start-up type and log on as a user for the NT services, by setting up the start-up type Expected state as Manual/Automatic/Disabled and log on as Expected state as Local user /Domain User etc.
BizTalk360 already supports multiple ways of notifications like Email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, ServiceNow, Webhook, and PowerShell Script to send the alerts. This is now expanded to support Twilio SMS, as this is a widely used platform for communication. Twilio is integrated into BizTalk360 by configuring the Account SID and Auth Token. BizTalk360 sends the notification to the Twilio account by using Twilio’s SMS API.
Twilio works similarly to other default notification channels: it will push the notification in the same format as other notification channels. For Instance, if a notification has exceeded the character limitation of 1600 characters, it will send out a trimmed message via the Twilio SMS Notification channel. It notifies the user about the status of the Monitor Group Types which are not in a healthy state.
BizTalk360 Reporting is mainly focused to monitor the Server performance and message transactions. The reports can be delivered on a scheduled basis to a group of end-users through email. To support multiple ways of notification, this feature is expanded to support Servicenow, Microsoft Teams, and SMTP Notification channels.
For this, you should configure the notification channel in BizTalk360, and you need to enable the respective notification channel in the schedule configuration window.
We had this tool earlier, but we have now revamped the BizTalk360 Troubleshooter to make our customer’s and support person’s tasks easier for a smooth and seamless troubleshooting experience, with a new UI layout as well as adding some rich capability in line with our latest v10.2 release. In the latest version of the tool, we can get the following details in addition to the existing BizTalk & SQL permissions, BizTalk360 Monitoring, and Analytics details and Report generation.
The tool is segregated into the below categories, under which we have a set of permission checks.
Troubleshoot: Use Single Account and Use Different Account.
User Account: Users can switch to another service account to troubleshoot the BizTalk360 and database configuration.
BizTalk360 Health: IIS check and BizTalk & SQL server permission check.
Environment: Environment Details, BizTalk NT Groups, AD permission check and SQL permission check
BizTalk360 Config: Dependencies, Web, Monitoring, Analytics and Database
Data Monitoring helps you to keep track of how business transactions in your BizTalk Group are progressing by monitoring the data points. Below are the improvements we have done in Data Monitoring section.
The Back-Up and DR feature now supports SQL Server Always On configurations.
BizTalk360 is a one-stop tool for monitoring and administration, with the BHM integration you can manage and monitor the BHM profiles. The BHM reports can now be downloaded in the Administration section, also the reports can be sent via email.
With this feature you can view and manage exceptions that happen in your integrations. By setting up the exception database connection string and the OnRamp URL setting in BizTalk360, you can start viewing the exceptions right in the BizTalk360 UI, and you are able to edit and resubmit faulty messages. Now, this ESB Endpoints configuration in environment settings has been made easier.
Also, The exception and itinerary DB, which are configured in different SQL instances, can be updated in the ESB configuration to view and manage the Itinerary data.
Besides the above enhancements, we also have improved other features and the performance of the product. We have also addressed production bugs. Go through the release notes to get a full insight about the v10.2 release. Also, don’t forget to upgrade to the latest build to utilize these amazing features in your production environment.
If you are not using BizTalk360, why don’t you download and try BizTalk360 in your own environment? We provide 30 days free trial of the fully functional product.
