There are multiple Microsoft customers in search of BizTalk monitoring tools for their BizTalk Infrastructure. Now a days, Microsoft BizTalk Server is used as Enterprise application middleware in various organisations. On a good day, BizTalk server will work like a charm and automate various business processes. However, on a not so good day (Friday evening worse case), a service might go down due to some patch, network scan or “scheduled upgrade”
Recently a friend of mine mentioned an incident where a client’s production line was shut down as they didn’t receive any orders, where the orders was just sitting suspended in BizTalk admin console. This might seem like a small issue but if you look at the larger picture, a shutdown of production line for a day can cost businesses a fortune.
This highlights one of the key requirements in BizTalk Server, i.e. monitoring.
Organisation sometimes don’t want to spend a fortune on monitoring solutions and would just like to have a simple monitoring tool with few key features. This blog is for those organisations, who would like to have basic monitoring for BizTalk Server. If you are looking for an enterprise level monitoring solution, it will be discussion in our future blogs.
Few years back, Microsoft introduced a BizTalk monitoring which provided email-based monitoring alerts. There are few third-party products that we will compare in the blog who have key features required to perform basic BizTalk Server monitoring.
We will start with an introduction of the products and compare key features that we believe are must have in a BizTalk environment.
Introduction
We will briefly state what the product owners have to say about their products, source URL and deep down into the key features for comparison.
BizTalk Notifier
BizTalk Notifier is a BizTalk Monitoring tool that notifies you in real-time the status of the artefacts (Ports, Orchestration & Hosts) that you are monitoring. Get notified within minutes as soon as your monitored artefacts go down. BizTalk monitoring has never been easy with continuous email notification alerts until services are restored.
Source- BizTalk Notifier
BizTalk 360
BizTalk 360 comes with a wide range of features to help you monitor and administer your BizTalk Server environments. These features will enhance operational security, increase productivity, provide proactive alerting for issues and facilitate auto-healing.
Source- https://www.biztalk360.com/
BizTalk Health Monitor
BHM is an MMC snap-in that allows the user to monitor the health of BizTalk Server environments and execute maintenance tasks.
Source- BHM
Key Features Comparison
Below is a key features table to compare products against each other
BizTalk Monitoring Tool Comparison
BizTalk out of the box doesn’t notify you if any ports/hosts/applications go down.
BHM provides the email notification but doesn’t have any functionality to send SMS. You can leverage the manual query setup and get the MBV and perfmon reports.
BizTalk notifier and BizTalk 360 both have these functionalities and can provide great reporting functionalities. Custom reporting is limited in the current version of BizTalk Notifier.
Usability, Configuration, Setup
We find setup and configuration of BizTalk notifier quite straight forward. You can configure the tool on remote server or within BizTalk environment.
BizTalk Notifier has windows based MSI with a light weight click and install options. BizTalk Notifier configuration installs the database and settings were as BizTalk Notifier main setup can be used straightaway for monitoring.
BHM configuration was a bit difficult and sometimes the setup of the queries was not so user friendly. BHM uses the query-based rules to setup the email notification and is quite manual.
BizTalk360 has an entire product suite to install, it has a list of features that can be installed and leverages IIS to provide a web based to manage BizTalk environments. It also creates a dedicated BizTalk360 database to perform its operations. With the detailed guide, it was easy to install BizTalk 360 once all the required components were installed.
Licencing and cost
BHM is a free to use product offered by Microsoft and has no constraints of licencing.
BizTalk360 has a complex licencing, which is dependent on various factors like BizTalk licence, number of servers, environment etc. For a standard BizTalk environment with (1App-1DB) DEV, (1App-1DB) UAT & (1+1App-Cluster-DB) PRD, we found the cost of BizTalk360 quite expensive. We find BizTalk 360 fit for big enterprises who want a full-scale BizTalk monitoring solution.
BizTalk Notifier on the other hand is quite affordable with the premium plan at just $175 per month with unlimited BizTalk and SQL servers. We find BizTalk Notifier fit for small to medium enterprises or even big enterprise who are not looking for a full-fledged BizTalk monitoring system and are looking for affordable notification and monitoring solution.