Is there any free tool for monitoring BizTalk applications remotely?

Question

whether command line or GUI, I'd be interested in testing every of them.

Answer 1

Do you mean monitor the status of each app? The only monitoring tools I know of are the ones from Microsoft here

If you want to monitor what the Biztalk app is doing, you'll need to put logging code into the app itself and then monitor the log (database table, event viewer, etc).

Answer 2

If you want to monitor what a BizTalk application is doing, you should use Business Activity Monitor (BAM). BAM allows you to track fields from messages or context, and track milestone shapes in orchestrations. There's a BAM training kit here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc963995.aspx

Answer 3

If you want to monitor the number of orchestrations being executed per second bu an application, or the number of messages going through a port, you can use Performance Monitor (perfmon). When you install BizTalk Server, a large number of new performance counters are installed.

Answer 4

If you want to be notified when a BizTalk application starts and stops, you can use WMI. Check into the sample WMI scripts included in the documentation for more info.

Answer 5

you can always use the smtp adapter to send failed messages to yourself. also performence counter is a great way to monitor biztalk - there is a lot of very useful data there.

Answer 6

If you are looking to monitor the message box, I have foudn the Message Box Viewer to be very handy. Its written by the MS BizTalk Support team. You can get it from here. link text

Answer 7

For performance monitoring, you can use PAL (http://www.codeplex.com/PAL). You can also use the Message Box Viewer to analyse the health of your system. And one other tool that I found recently and seem quite coold is the BizTalk Documenter (http://www.codeplex.com/BizTalkDocumenter). It is a must have in the tool box of any BizTalk developer.

Answer 8

BizMon

There is an new BizTalk monitoring tool called BizMon. You can check that out here. I think it does what you like.

We use this for our three mid-sized BizTalk environments (~50 BizTalk application in each) and it works good for us. But you can try it for yourself. The tool is free up to 5 applications (if you're however monitoring more applications than that you'll need a license).

FRENDS Helium

Another tool that might be worth a test is FRENDS Helium. I haven't tried this myself but they have a beta one can request and try out. Don't know anything about pricing or things like that though.

Answer 9

Hi Nano,

Your question is very generic and all the answers above assumed various things. When it comes to BizTalk monitoring its means different things to different people. Your BizTalk administrator might monitor the overall health of the BizTalk environment by opening the BizTalk Administration console. BizTalk Admin console allows adminstrators to deploy and mange BizTalk applications, in addition it also allows to monitor the health of the running systems. He/She can query for things like running instances (Orchestration, Messaging), suspended instances (resumable/non-resumable), Failed routing messages, failed subscription messages etc etc. BizTalk admin console can also be accessed remotely from a different machine if you have installed BizTalk Admin bits while installation via a MMC snap in.

Apart from this you also have HAT (Health and Activity Tracking in 2006, not in 2009 onwards), which allows you to do certain monitoring. But to access HAT you need to be on any one of the BizTalk machines.

Next comes BAM, which will require some custome configuration or in some cases some custom coding based on your requirements to capture some runtime monitoring data.

Next you got various performance counters, which will give you lot of statitical information like number of orchestrations running inside the host instance, spool size, number of messages received/send, etc etc.

I didn't find any necessity to go for a third party software for any of my monitoring requirements.

HTP Saravana Kumar BizTalk Server MVP.

Answer 10

Seems like now FRENDS Helium is downloadable from their website - it also has a free trial version.

Answer 11

There is another solution called Minotaur. It is an end to end monitoring solution for Biztalk applications and environments. Check it out here There is a free version and then also professional licenses starting at $899

Answer 12

Hello;

I am new here. Can any one tell me how i can monitor BIZtalk with whatsup Gold premium IP switch.

we use this whatsup gold thrid party tool to monitor the serevrs we got.

I am just checking how to monitor BIZTALK with whatsup.

Can any please help me?

Answer 13

hi, I just need to check if some application is enabled or not. like a health check report. in the GUI, we see Applications running or parially started right. is there a way to get it from command line ?