We are excited to announce that version 10.5 of BizTalk360 is ready for production use. We have mostly focused on customer feedback and enhancing the product with new features and a couple of improvements. Let’s see a brief view of each new feature and enhancement we added for this release.
Well! Users with the access to the Analytics module (Platinum) tier use the Performance counters from BizTalk and SQL servers to visualise the performance metrics in the widget. The collected data is used for (custom) analytics widgets, the Throttling Analyzer, and Throttling monitoring.
Why not also expose the collected Performance counters via a query interface.
The new Performance Queries feature, which combines specific user access controls with rich filtering options and the ability to save queries, is introduced in the Administration section.
Working with Windows NT Services is almost always essential. It is heavily used by the Microsoft Windows operating system. If you’re a BizTalk360 user, you’re probably aware of how BizTalk360 assists in running NT services and monitoring their health, as well as the Startup type and log on as account.
Consider a scenario where a service has been configured with high availability/clustered under node 1 and node 2 respectively. From the two nodes, the services needs to be in the active state in any one of the nodes for performing the auto-correct operation. It’s a tedious task for the admin/support people to start the services manually if both of them go down. To overcome this problem, we’ve introduced automated NT services operations to make things easier and faster.
The following operations that can be performed are
Note
Select one or more NT services on which you want to carry out the required action. Specify the schedule to automatically trigger your task daily, weekly, or monthly.
It is a great investment for large organizations to optimize and monitor the performance of their applications and related issues. Keeping this in mind, BizTalk360 has included tools such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace to monitor the performance of the BizTalk Server in one place.
Previously, BizTalk360 enabled users to measure the performance of the Windows Server. Now, three new categories have been added which allow users to monitor the performance of the server to make sure their business operations run smoothly.
The categories are BizTalk Messaging Performance, BizTalk Host Performance, BizTalk Transmission Rate.
BizTalk360 always stands for providing best experience for all platforms by enriching the user interface to retain users for a long time. Yes, you got it! In that way we improved the user experience of interfaces throughout the application like
BizTalk360 Team is glad to inform its users that we have a bunch of improvements that eliminate the need for manual effort in various BizTalk-related routine actions. Let us see into the details.
BizTalk360 supports the automatic execution of PowerShell scripts on both local and remote servers. The PowerShell script execution step is incorporated in the custom workflow Automated Task in this release.
Users could be required to run a script on several artifacts as part of a single custom workflow task in the case of maintenance.
Of course, it is normal to have failure or partially failed task execution for any internal or environmental issues. Say for instance,
These kinds of failures are not regarded as serious problems, and there is a chance that, after some time, the task will be successfully completed if you retry it at the requested intervals. Additionally, it is effective to ignore resources that have already succeeded and just retry failed resources.
In previous versions, users had to create a maintenance schedule to stop getting alerts or manually find conflicting alarms then remove their mappings or disable them to prevent a flood of false alerts.
Think of case, you may have created a task to turn off all application ports and host instances in the environment due to some kind of maintenance or deployment. In the same case, you could have alarms in your BizTalk360 environment that keeps on monitoring the same artifacts and host instances are in a healthy state and autocorrect them if they are stopped.
In such a scenario, after executing that task, users will be bombarded with receiving false alerts, notifying the mapped artifacts are turned off, and auto-corrects will try to bring the artifacts to the mapped state.
That is made even easier now in Automated Tasks. The basic idea here is, whenever you configure a Custom Workflow Task, BizTalk360 will automatically check for the alarms’ mappings that conflict with the task configuration. All you must do is simply select the required alarms and include them in the task to disable it at the end of the task execution so that the notifications will not be triggered. If you feel the mappings will not affect your process, you can then continue without change.
Our clients have often requested that “At least one active” action be supported for host instances in Automated Tasks. We are pleased to announce that we have now included that as well.
Users of BizTalk360 version 10.5 and later can define tasks that will automatically get the pair of clustered host instances into the “At least one active” state. By performing this, the active host instance in a cluster pair will be started, guaranteeing that the server is running, and no downtime happens for that host/server.
Reliability and security are the most important when it comes to any operations. BizTalk360 will capture and audit every change made to the automated tasks configurations. The details can be viewed under Governance Audit -> Configurations Activities. Here the details like who created the task, what changes were made to the task, and if any task was deleted can be identified.
We always want our users work to be as simple as possible. Why to add the connection string for each Azure queues and topics monitoring? Now the available azure service bus queues and topics will be listed under the subscription added to the environment similar to the logic apps and API apps monitoring section.
As BizTalk360 is always open for customer feedback and we never missed to address them in possible ways.
In this version we solved the below,
In previous versions of BizTalk360, users are accessible to IBM MQ using the configuration with IP address. Now we have extended the support by allowing the configuration with the host name of the server where the IBM MQ is installed.
It’s essential to know the way in which constituent parts of the servers are interrelated or arranged. The users can view the topology of their setup in landing page for each environment using the quick view and the full screen view in Infrastructure of Administration section.
Here, the topology UI has been improved for those who are using the SQL and BizTalk Server either in high availability or cluster as well. The indication of load balancing servers has also been added. BizTalk360 lists the databases available in the SQL Server instances too.
BizTalk360 users are familiar that we brought the audit functionality of operations performed in BizTalk admin console with indication to differentiate the audit logs of BizTalk360 in earlier version. Now we have enhanced by auditing some additional operations like BizTalk port and transport level configurations made in BizTalk admin console with enriched user interface and easy filter options.
Note: Across the governance & audit, the selection of multiple values in the filter components is allowed.
Notification channels plays a vital role in the support system where users’ needs to be notified on the errors and warnings of resources. As we support the custom notification channels for alarms, now it is enhanced for the automated task and Analytics reports as well by configuring the required options while adding the custom notifications.
Well, we hope that the new features and enhancements introduced in this release BizTalk360 Version 10.5 will be highly useful and meet your business requirements. If you are not already a BizTalk360 user, why not give BizTalk360 a try? We have a free trial for you to try!
