Stefan Bier, BizTalk Executive
TecAlliance GmbH
TecAlliance is a leading solution provider for the automotive aftermarket that offers data, processes and integrated services. TecAlliance has the goal of speeding up processes and making information available quickly always for all participants in the digital aftermarket. Founded in 1994 with headquarters in Ismaning, Germany, TecAlliance handles approximately 25 million item enquiries and orders per month for over 280 brands and roughly 20,000 customer sites worldwide.
BizTalk is important to TecAlliance because it is the core of our Order solution. It is used for mapping among different input formats and for communication with customer interfaces. There are three BizTalk Servers running in Production with one application and four BizTalk Servers running for testing purposes. To manage and monitor the three BizTalk servers running in production, the team at TecAlliance GmbH had used workaround monitoring systems with self-programmed scripts and tools. A lot of manual monitoring effort was required to make sure the production environment was running and healthy.
Earlier, when we had a problem, we had to check each BizTalk server one by one to figure out where the problem is. Even though our scripts helped us to find the issues, it was still a time-intensive job. Now we can see it with one glance at the dashboard or from the alerts we receive.
-Stefan Bier
TecAlliance GmbH
The team started to consider alternative products with better customization options for BizTalk server monitoring. The team wanted software that provided a graphical overview of system health and notifications, if something went wrong in the environment. The external company that developed the BizTalk solution for TecAlliance GmbH recommended BizTalk360 to TecAlliance management. The TecAlliance evaluation team appreciated BizTalk360’s flexible customization options for BizTalk server monitoring; installation and configuration were very easy. Additional features such as data monitoring, Web endpoint monitoring and auto healing were of very specific interest. These gave TecAlliance the confidence to implement BizTalk360 in their BizTalk server environment.
The team at TecAlliance make extensive use of the Monitoring Dashboard feature so that the Operations Department can get a holistic view of in the state of the environment. The Auto Healing capability is used to recover from unexpected down times. This feature prevents the frustration the team had in the past when they were new to BizTalk and not everything worked as expected. TecAlliance uses BizTalk360 as a pure monitoring tool for alerts.
We had a chat with one of the BizTalk executives at TecAlliance GmbH. This is what he had to say about his experiences with BizTalk360 –
With BizTalk360, we save a lot of time during our daily operation tasks — from terminating suspended instances on a regular basis to getting a complete health overview from our SQL-Server, BizTalk and Web endpoints after a Deployment, for example
-Stefan Bier
TecAlliance GmbH
“Excellent! It’s the tool of choice for monitoring our BizTalk servers.”
“Very pleasant. It’s a great product and easy to use. There are still some features missing, like SQL authentication for database queries instead of integrated security, but I’m sure they will be addressed soon enough.”
“A lot. We can now focus on important stuff and trust BizTalk360 to keep an eye on our systems.”
“Very helpful. Response times are great, and the support team really knows what they are talking about.”
