BizTalk360 ESB Reporting

Introducing ESB Reporting in BizTalk360

Published on : Jan 18, 2017

Category : BizTalk360 Update

daniel

Author

BizTalk360 ESB Portal is the key feature for our customers who are utilizing ESB in their integrations. We have built a brand new portal from ground up to improve compatibility with modern browsers, enhance user experience to meet the current standards and increase the performance which is a key in our fast paced environments. However, we did not have a chance to implement another important feature which is Reporting.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document. Introducing ESB Reporting in BizTalk360.

Introduction

With our upcoming release of BizTalk360 v8.3, we are bringing you more exciting features that will enhance your productivity when working with BizTalk. In this release, we have decided to deliver our users with ESB Reporting capabilities which we have missed out from the original portal. You might be aware that the BizTalk ESB toolkit contains pre-configured BAM Views to track the Itineraries and Exceptions. BAM is an excellent way to monitor your processes and business metrics, however creating the view and mapping it can be time consuming, so having them done for you is a real time saver. Nonetheless, due to the not so friendly user interface and troublesome configuration of the original ESB portal, some of our customers were not using it to view this information. Since tracking data is invaluable in middleware software such as BizTalk it was a necessity for us to deliver a solution which allows users to display tracking data within BizTalk360.

BAM Views

Inside of the ESB Toolkit package, you will find two BAM Views which will enable you to monitor itineraries and itinerary services which are currently running as well as the ones which have completed their execution. The second view will allow you to see the exceptions that have occurred in BizTalk. These views will provide you with a lot of useful data which can be utilized for analysis, monitoring and reporting. Once the views are deployed, you have to enable Tracking in order to make it fully functional. To track itineraries, you have to enable this inside Visual Studio Itinerary Designer by going to the properties of every itinerary service and setting the tracking property to true (see screenshot below). Itinerary-BizTalk360 ESB Reporting If you want to enable exceptions tracking as well, then you have to find All.Exceptions Send Port, go to its properties and then to the configuration window of the send pipeline ESBFaultProcessor. In the configuration window make sure that the ESB BAM Tracker property Enabled is set to true. AllExceptions BizTalk360 ESB Reporting

BizTalk360 ESB Reporting

Once you have installed the latest version (v8.3) of BizTalk360, go to the Settings page where you will need to configure and validate all ESB Settings. When this is successfully completed, BizTalk360 automatically adds the ESB Reports to your home navigation under ESB Portal. The reports are graph widgets that query the data out of the database and display it in a meaningful way. If you need to add any of the widgets to another dashboard, then each of them is available from the Dashboard Customization menu. We have prepared for you 13 different widgets which will hopefully help you in understanding your ESB integrations better and help in analyzing the data to improve the performance.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document. Introducing ESB Reporting in BizTalk360.

Fault Count Widgets

Fault count widgets will be used to query the BAM database and identify the number of faults / exceptions that have occurred in your ESB Integrations. There will be multiple widgets which will display the data based on application, service or error type. These will help to identify the most troublesome applications or services in your integration and will help you to choose and prioritise them for future improvements. FaultCountByapp BizTalk360 ESB Reporting

Over Time Widgets

Over time widgets will display information about faults, resubmission and execution times, which will help you to understand and monitor the current state of your integrations. The information will provide you with a clear understanding if the number of errors have increased or decreased over time and even give you an idea of which change caused that improvement or deterioration in the performance of your applications. FaultCountOverTime BizTalk360 ESB Reporting

Itinerary Widgets

Itinerary widgets will give you more insight into your logic and help you analyse long running itineraries, which service is causing the slow-down, which itineraries and currently being executed and how many itineraries have been processed in the recent days. You will also be able to understand what are the execution times of your itineraries and which need a second thought to improve the performance.

List of upcoming widgets in BizTalk360 version 8.3

1. Fault Count By Application 2. Fault Count By Error Type 3. Fault Count By Service 4. Fault Count Over Time By Application 5. Fault Count Over Time By Service 6. Resubmission Over Time By Application 7. Resubmission Over Time By Service 8. Itinerary Execution Times 9. Running Itineraries 10. Running Itinerary Services 11. Processed Itineraries 12. Fault Count By Error Type For Application 13. Fault Count By Over Time By Service For Application

Summary

With the power of ESB, BAM and BizTalk360 the users will be geared to monitor, analyse and improve their ESB integrations to achieve the maximum performance. The widgets will help them to surface the data from BAM and ESB tables in a meaningful way for both developers and business users. These widgets are already being developed and undergoing a testing cycle. If you have any feedback, please write to support@biztalk360.com or leave feedback at feedback.biztalk360.com. Don’t wait till v8.3 to get started with BizTalk360. Start your 14 day Free Trial today and experience the power of BizTalk360 to overcome your challenges with BizTalk server administration.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document. Introducing ESB Reporting in BizTalk360.