BizTalk 2013 R2 ships with a new tool called as “BizTalk Health Monitor”. In this post we will learn:

1-     Where to find BizTalk Health Monitor

2-     How to register BizTalk Health Monitor SnapIn

3-     How to integrate BHM SnapIn to BizTalk Admin Console

Prerequisites: BizTalk Server 2013 R2 should be installed and configured.

Where to find BizTalk Health Monitor

BHM can be found under the Support Tools folder. Typically path for Support Tools is:

<Installation drive>Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 R2\SDK\Utilities\Support Tools

Above path should have a folder known as “BizTalkHealthMonitor”.

How to register BizTalk Health Monitor SnapIn

We can use InstallUtil.exe which comes with BizTalk Health Monitor tool to register the BHM snap in. Follow these steps to register the snap-in:

1-     Open a command prompt as an administrator

2-     Navigate to the Support Tools folder (<Installation drive>Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 R2\SDK\Utilities\Support Tools)

3-     Type InstallUtil.exe MBVSnapIn.dll and hit enter. This step will do some registry changes and register the SnapIn to be used

How to integrate BHM SnapIn to BizTalk Admin Console

By now we have already registered the BHM SnapIn and now we will integrate this to be used with BizTalk Administration Console.

Before we proceed please note that BHM SnapIn can be used independently and need not to be integrated with BizTalk Administration Console. We are showing this step more from convenience point of view.

1-     From Run, type mmc /32 and press enter. This will open a new MMC window.

2-     Go to File-->Add/Remove Snap-in

3-     From the Add or Remove Snap-ins Window add following snap-ins and then click Ok

a. Microsoft BizTalk Server Administration

b. BizTalk Health Monitor 

4-     By now your new MMC is ready which shows both the BizTalk Server Administration and BizTalk Health Monitor

5-     Now you might want to save this as a new .msc file so that you don’t have to repeat these steps again. For that, go to File-->Save As option, give a name and then save it.

6-     From next time onwards, you can use this new .msc file to open you BizTalk Admin Console which will be incorporated with the BizTalk Health Monitor

Presentation

You probably already know or use “MsgBoxViewer” (aka “MBV”), a windows based application gathering all information of a BizTalk group and detecting any issues, non-critical or critical warnings. It is vital for a BizTalk administrator to have complete and detailed knowledge of a BizTalk group at any time, and detect any potential problems in advance. MBV has been perfectly achieving this task; but it remains a separated tool with its own user interface and HTML output and you have to run it periodically.

After releasing MBV as a standalone tool for several years,  the MBV project team decided to integrate it more closely with the BizTalk Administration Console to provide BizTalk administrators  a quick and complete dashboard of a BizTalk group which will help them monitor the health of their BizTalk platform.

 A new BizTalk snap-in, named “BizTalk Health Monitor” (aka “BHM”), has so been created to help you easily monitor the health of your BizTalk environment. BHM is based on the same engine as MBV. This snap-in can be added to the existing BizTalk Administration Console or can be run individually in its own MMC window. Visit this post to learn more about how to register the BHM MMC with BizTalk MMC.

 The first version of BHM is included in BizTalk 2013 R2 in the “Support tools” folder but updates will be released periodically with new features (and fixes if needed). The first update is almost ready and should be available soon.

 Following are the major features of BHM:

• Monitor Multiple BizTalk Environments
• Generate and View MBV reports
• Dashboard view for overall health of BizTalk Environments
• Schedule Report Collection
• Send Email Notifications
• Performance Monitor integration with pre-loaded scenario-based Performance counters
• Report Management

Below is the detailed list of these features but we will go more in-depth for each feature in future posts.

Monitor multiple BizTalk Environments

BHM Snap-in allows monitoring multiple BizTalk environments from a single MMC. When you register BHM on a BizTalk server, by default it will add a “group” node representing the current BizTalk group configured for this server. You can however add additional nodes corresponding to different BizTalk groups by specifying its name, the location of its Management database and the output folder.

Each group node will have its own customized settings in term of its level of information to collect, its level of information to display, its type of notifications to enable, or its type of performance data to collect.

This feature allows you to monitor multiple BizTalk platforms  like Production and Pre-Production BizTalk groups from single MMC.

Generate and View MBV report

 Once a group node is added in the BHM hierarchy, you can start immediately to analyze its corresponding BizTalk group by right-clicking on the node and select the “Analyze now” menu item.

The analysis consists of running a number of queries to collect all important information of the BizTalk group, evaluating a set of rules for each of them, and raising any warnings (critical or not) if there is any.
Note: The engine, the queries, and rules repository are the same as used by MBV.

 Each time an analysis process is completed, a child node report is added in the group node. Each child report has further sub-nodes to present the collected information:

• Critical Warnings
• Warnings
• Summary
• Topology
• Queries

This sub-nodes list details depends on the level of information you selected to display in BHM. The property page Information level of the group node settings allows you to select which sub-nodes you want to display for each generated report, and the level of information to collect during the analysis process (as shown below). The more queries you select to include in the analysis, the more information and potentially more warnings BHM will raise.

You can so customize as you want the level of information to analyze and display in BHM for each added group node.

This is for example the output of the Topology sub-node :

Dashboard view for overall health of BizTalk Environment

 The output of the “Analyze Now” action will also generate a dashboard (as shown below) presenting a quick summary all the information you need to know about the BizTalk platform. We have categorized the information under different tiles as their names suggest. Each tile will be presented with a small icon on the bottom right of the tile which represents the overall health of that category. A green right mark shows that this category is healthy. A yellow exclamation sign represents some non-critical warnings whereas a red exclamation represents some critical warnings which need immediate attention. You can click on these tiles to get additional details on the lower pane.

Schedule Report collection

 A BizTalk platform processing messages 24x7 needs to be monitored at least daily. BHM provides you a way to create a scheduled task to automate a periodic collection of BHM report.

The property page Schedule of the group node settings provides an option to enable a scheduled analyze. This schedule task can be of course modified then in the Windows Task Scheduler.

Send Email Notifications

Receiving by mail the list of warning that MBV generates is a feature that has been demanded by lot of MBV users. We have incorporated this feature in BHM where you have an option to send the dashboard and the list of warnings to an email address after a fresh analysis.

BHM provides so an option to send automatically by mail the dashboard and the list of warnings after a fresh analysis. You can enable and configure this feature from the property page of the group node settings (select the “Settings” menu item when right clicking on a group node). An email will also be sent each time if you have scheduled the BHM report collection.

 We have also provided a Test button which you can use to test the SMTP settings you have entered. It will send a test email to make sure that SMPT settings are correct.

Perfmon integration with pre-loaded scenario based Performance counters

 BizTalk provides a large number of performance counters to monitor like the state of the BizTalk databases, the BizTalk queues, the messaging and XLANG performances, the  throttling states, the adapters performances etc…There are various such counters available but they are less known and visible to the BizTalk administrators.

 BHM directly integrates Perfmon tool in its own MMC which provides a quick and easy way to monitor these counters. Furthermore, for each group node, BHM provides you a list of predefined views with pre-selected counters that you can quickly display at any time.

BHM will let you display either the current activity of the monitored BizTalk platform, or a recorded performance activity.

• Current activity
  
  When the current activity node is selected, you can choose a BizTalk server belonging to the monitored BizTalk group or any server you want. BHM provides default tabs in the current activity view with default counters but you can create your own tabs with your own counters  (right-click on tab to display the context-menu and create a new one).

• Recorded activity

BHM can also automate the recording of a perfmon activity for a given period. You can enable and configure this feature from the property page Recorded Performance activity of the group node settings (as show below).

BHM provides you a set of pre-defined scenarios with selected performance counters and you can choose the preferred scenario. You can also add your own counters if you chose the custom scenario option. The property page allows you to configure the sample interval and the duration of the recorded activity.

Once the recorded activity is configured, BHM can automate the creation, the start & stop of a performance log file corresponding to the selected scenario. When the recorded activity is completed, you can display it inside BHM by selecting the corresponding sub-node (as show below).

BizTalk Health Monitor is a snap-in which can be used to monitor a BizTalk environment. For more information about BHM, see this link.

BHM was originally released with BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and now we have released a standalone version of BHM for use with BizTalk Server 2010 and BizTalk Server 2013. You can download the standalone version of BHM from this link. The registration process of BHM is same as it was for BizTalk 2013 R2. Visit this link for more details.

BHM has been tested and is supported on BizTalk 2010, BizTalk 2013 and BizTalk 2013 R2. It may work for other versions of BizTalk Server, however it won’t be officially supported.

BizTalk Health Monitor MMC snap-in is available since June 2014 with the release of BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and also as a standalone version for BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013. This first version was developed based on the known MBV engine to provide out of the box way to administer your BizTalk environment. BHM gives you a powerful dashboard to monitor the health of your BizTalk group. For more details on BHM and its features visit this post. We collected lot of feedbacks from BHM users to enrich BHM with new features, at the same time made it more reliable to provide a better experience. This post will concentrate on all the new features of BHM with v2.

This version will be available to download for BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013 from BHM download link whereas it will be released for 2013 R2 with the upcoming cumulative update.

Following is the list of new features with BHM v2. Click on each feature to get more details:

1. Customized Dashboard– Now you can customize your dashboard by adding\removing\resizing custom tiles.
2. Custom Queries– You can add your own queries to the BHM to make it more personalize and enrich the out of the box BHM query repository.
3. Custom Rules– BHM v2 will also allow you to add custom rules on your custom queries or existing BHM queries so you can easily monitor your environment specific information.
4. Profiles enhancements– You can create multiple profiles to monitor a single or multiple BizTalk groups. Based on customers feedback we have made some enhancements in the profile management:
1. Now you can add the option to specify a different user under which BHM should collect the report.
2. We also moved the report management from BHM to per profile level so that you can manage the BHM reports for each profile separately.
3. You can easily create a copy of a profile and reuse it for other group or some other modifications.
4. You now have an option to select if you want to create the HTML page. You can uncheck this option to preserve disk space.
5. Renamed it from “Group” to “Profile”

Customized Dashboard

First version of BHM Dashboard comes up with seven default tiles showing categorized information about the BizTalk group. With this version we have given an option to add your own custom tiles. These custom tiles can be created to display any entries from the Warnings, Summary or Query output sections of BHM. This can be done by just a right click on one or more selected entries of these views. You can either pin them to a new or existing custom tiles on your dashboard to display output of a specific query or the portion of the summary report or warnings.  

This feature is useful for a quick display of some critical information of your specific environment in the dashboard view of a given profile. Custom tiles are displayed in green color and can be resized, renamed, removed by just a right click on it.

Another important point is that this customization is done per profile so it gives you a lot of flexibility in customization.

 Like default tiles, each list view (bottom second half of the dashboard) entry of a custom tile provides an hyperlink to the source query and also an hyperlink to the rule which produced it and you can in one click disable the rule. We haven’t put any limit on the number of custom tiles you can have on the dashboard and you can’t remove\rename the default tiles but you can resize them.

This is a sample of dashboard customization:

Let’s have a look at what you can pin and how you can pin custom tiles to the dashboard:

Following are the items which can be pinned to the BHM dashboard:

1. Warnings and Critical Warning sections
2. Summary Report sections
3. Any query from the query report
4. Any specific row of the query from query report

The steps to add a custom tile for first three are pretty much same. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Select the item that you would like to add as a custom tile on the dashboard.
2. Right click on the item and then select “Pin to the dashboard”
3. This gives you an option to either add a new tile or add to an existing tile

Following are the snapshots of how it can be done in all the three cases:

Warnings and Critical Warning sections

Summary Report sections

Any query output from the query report

Notes:

If you pin a query output in its own tile, the entire content of the query output will be displayed in the dashboard when selecting the custom tile. If however you add a query in an existing tile, only a link entry to the query will be added in the list view of the custom tile.

Multiple query output links from the query report

Any specific row of the query from query report

You can also choose to display some specific row(s) from a query output by clicking on a custom tile.

For example you can chose to display some specific send ports with their names and status by just selecting their rows in the Send ports query and adding them to the dashboard.

To achieve that:

• expand the Queries output node of an existing report and then expand the category node of the query.
• Select the query to display its rows in the MMC detail view (right side)
• Select and right click on one or more rows which you want to add as a custom tile.
• Select “Pint to dashboard” to display the context menu.
• Select which columns you want to show as Caption and its corresponding Values.

In the end this is how the customized dashboard looks like:

BHM Repository customization

This is another important feature of BHM v2: the possibility to add your own queries and rules in the repository of BHM. You can very quickly add your own custom queries in the query repository of a given profile and create your own rules, selecting existing or custom source queries.

Custom queries

BHM repository has a collection of almost 200 queries and now with v2 you have an option to build and add your own queries to this repository. The type of a custom query you can add are:

• WMI query
• VB Script
• PowerShell query
• Batch file (.bat)
• CMD

 Once a custom query is added in a profile, it will be saved in that profile and visible in the query tree view of the “Information Level” of the profile settings and can be checked or unchecked, like any native queries of BHM. And like any native BHM queries, a custom query can be pinned to a dashboard.

To add a custom query:

• Right click on the Profile select Settings.
• Select the “Queries” tab which also list all the BHM queries.
• Click on the button “New <query type>”
• Fill the query body in the new query Dialog Box and test your query
• Validate the query Dialog Box
• The query will be visible at that time in the tree view of the information level tab so that you can check it to include in the collect statement
• Validate the settings page to persist the custom query in your profile

You can of course edit or remove custom queries

Notes:

• Only WMI queries allow you to specify a target server; for the other types of query, execution will be local to the server running BHM.
• Only WMI queries will create columns in the query output; for the other types of query, the output will be on a unique columns named “Output” (this possibility exists in MBV engine used by BHM but not yet exposed)
• Each query of BHM can be quickly tested using the “Test” button in the tab “Queries” 

Custom Rules

BHM engine has a repository of rules which are applied on its queries and are displayed in the report accordingly. Out of the box BHM comes up with around 450 rules which does various kind of checks on your BizTalk environment. And if that’s not enough BHM v2 will give you an option to write your own custom rules on existing or custom queries.

A Rule in BHM is a set of conditions (AND between the conditions) checking each row of a query output, and a set of triggered actions if all the conditions are validated. Each rule target a query and will be executed at the end of the query execution, parsing each row of the query output to validate the conditions.

A condition is composed of two fields to compare using a predicate. One field represent the column value to check for the current parsed row and the other field is the value to compare with. The predicate can be selected among a given list. You can add as many conditions as you want, and if all the conditions are validated for a parsed row then the rule will trigger some actions.

You can create tree types of action:

• Add an entry in the summary or warnings sections  (if the information level field  is a warning)
• Add an entry in the topology section
• Spawn a process

Follow this to add a rule:

• Right click on the Profile and select settings.
• Select the tab “Rules” listing all the BHM rules and their source query.
• Click on the button “Add custom rule”
• Select the target query, click ok.
• Fill the rule properties, conditions and actions in the rule Dialog Box
• Test your rule : an HTML view will be displayed with the query output and the Summary & warnings sections
• Validate that the rule is added to the rules list view
• Validate at the settings page that the rule is persisted as a custom rule in your profile

You can of course edit or remove custom rules

Notes:

• You can also add a rule by right clicking on a query in the queries output node
• To help you creating your own rule, we recommend to look at the details of existing native rules of BHM :

For example select any rule targeting the query “BizTalk events in last hours”and then click on the button “Show Rule details”. You can then select each condition and actions of the rules and see their details.

• Some rules of BHM will not display conditions because they are coded in a custom assembly.
• Because of only AND logic between the conditions and of the limited number of predicates available, complex custom rule cannot be created using the rule Dialog Box.

MBV engine used by BHM allows to create complex rules in custom assemblies but this feature is not yet exposed in BHM.

Profile enhancements

Profile nodes

BHM v1 allowed you to create additional group nodes in the BHM MMC to target different BizTalk groups and specify different level of information to collect. We extended this notion to name it as “Profiles” where you can continue to target different BizTalk group but also different sets of customization settings. You can so create multiple profiles targeting a same BizTalk group but having different level of information to collect (different queries created and selected, different rules enabled, etc..)

This is the new settings Dialog Box of a given profile:

Report management

We have moved the BHM report management option from MMC to profiles level. So you can manage your BHM reports per profile basis and mention different specify retention period for your reports. This change be useful if you target different BizTalk groups in you profiles.

Profile Duplication

An existing profile can be now quickly be copied over to create a new profile. This feature is interesting if you want to reuse an existing profile settings for monitoring other BizTalk groups.

To do this, just right click on a the profile and select the menu item “Duplicate profile”

Do not generate HTML files

BHM now provides an option in the “Information Level” tab of the profile settings Dialog Box to not generate BHM HTML files during a collect (analyze). This option can preserve disk space for each report generated in the profile output folder, but you will not be able to open reports in the browser however.

This post is used to list the known issues reported in the last version of BizTalk Health Monitor (currently the v2) and when possible workarounds.
You can let in this post your comments if you want to report new issues.
We will update periodically BHM to fix them and bring also new features.

Known issues:

When a user account is specified to schedule a BHM collect, the creation of the task returns the following error: "A specified logon session does not  exist. It may already have been terminated". 

The policy "Do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication" is maybe enabled preventing to create a task under a specific user account.
If it is a local policy and if you can disable it, follow these steps :

- Open the 'Local Security Policies' MMC
- Expand 'Local Policies' and select 'Security Options'
- Disable that property - the system must reboot for the change to take effect



BHM on a localized OS is hanging and crashing when creating a new monitoring profile. 

The root cause was identified and fixed. We will release soon a post V2 update fixing that problem.
Users who want a temporary fix can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).



When we create a monitoring profile targeting a BizTalk group not accessible by the logged-on user, the  console is crashing.

During the creation of a profile, BHM connects to the Mgmt db of the targeted group to retrieve the list of BizTalk servers of that group - this list will be used in the performance nodes.
This connection attempt made under the interactive logged-on user account is failing because this user does not have rights on the Mgmt Db, and this error is not well catched.
We will release soon a post V2 update allowing to specify the user account in the new profile dialogbox and managing better connection errors.

You should be able workaround that issue by editing manually an XML profile file following the steps below  :

- Duplicate an existing profile using the new "duplicate profile" menu item

- open a CMD window under elevated admin priviledge

- in this cmd change the folder to "c:\programdata\Microsoft\BizTalk Health Monitor"

- open in notepad the XML file corresponding to this duplicated profile

- modify in this xml file the value of MGMTDBSERVER and MGMTDBNAME properties to specify the location of the new Mgmt db you want to target

- modify the value of the "DEFAULTBTS" property entering the name of one BizTalk server of that new targeted group

- modify the value of the "ALLBTS" property entering this same BizTalk server or the complete list of all your BTS of the new targeted group, ex : Value="BTSRV1:True:True:True, BTSRV2:False:False:True"

- save the xml file

- Open BHM console : you should see then the new profile listed

- Display the Settings dialogbox of the new profile and specify the user to run the collect as

We are proud to announce the release of v3 for BizTalk Health Monitor which can be downloaded and used to monitor and maintain BizTalk Server environments. We released the v2 of BHM during November last year with lots of customizable features which gives you an option to write your own queries and rules. For v3 of BHM we wanted to provide some additional functionality which not just help you finding a problem but also gives you an option to resolve it. And what could be a better option other than well-known “Terminator”. Terminator is the only supported tool from Microsoft which can be used to resolve various database integrity issues within your BizTalk Databases. You can read more about Terminator here.

This post will concentrate on all the new features of BizTalk Health Monitor with v3.

Following is the list of new features included in v3 of BHM. You can click on each feature to read more about its usage:

1. Terminator Integration
2. Store BHM reports in SQL DB
3. Support for custom SQL query
4. Force Full Report Option
5. Enhanced query repository
6. New and Useful BHM homepage 

Terminator Integration

BizTalk Health Monitor now come up with a new node named as “Maintenance” which integrates the Terminator tool.

We have kept the look and feel of the Maintenance node pretty much same as Terminator with few notifications enhancements. You can start with selecting an existing BHM profile for which you want to run any Maintenance task. It is required that all of the following are true before you run any Maintenance task:

Once all is selected you can click on Connect to proceed further.

Once you click on Connect, you can see the Terminator like interface where you can choose any of the available task for execution. There are basically five types of Tasks you can choose from:

1. View (Default)
2. Performance
3. Manage
4. Delete
5. From latest BHM Report

View Tasks - These tasks can be used to query your BizTalk Databases on various counters without making any modifications. List of available View Tasks are:

Performance Tasks – Performance tasks can be used to modify any performance related parameters for your BizTalk Server. List of available Performance Tasks are:

Manage Tasks– These tasks can be used to manage BizTalk DB related operations. Executing these tasks may make modifications to your existing BizTalk DBs. List of available Manage Tasks are:

Delete Tasks – Tasks under this category can be used to resolve BizTalk DB integrity related issues. You need to be very cautious while selecting any of these tasks as selecting and executing wrong task may have adverse effect on your BizTalk DB. To help you choose the right task we have provide complete details of the task under the Description tab. List of available Delete tasks are:

From Latest BHM Report – When you select this task, the Task List drop down will be populated with the list of identified tasks for selected profile that can be resolved by Maintenance engine. The list is captured from the latest BHM report. This is the same option that was previously available for MBV and Terminator integration. You can read more about this option here.

Following screenshot will show you the typical flow of executing a task in Maintenance node, once you are connected:

1. Use this dropdown to view and select a task types from various available tasks types
2. Use this dropdown to view and select a task from various available tasks for selected task types
3. Once you select the task at step#2 Description tab will give you complete details about the selected task
4. You can use Parameters tab to feed in parameters to the task, if required.
5. Once you feed in the parameters, you can click on Execute Task to start Task Execution.
6. Once the task is completed you can view the output of the task under Results tab.
7. Once the task execution is completed you can click on Disconnect to close the Maintenance node.

There are three types of scripts that has been used to write terminator tasks:

1. SQL
2. WMI
3. PowerShell

You can view and download the SQL script from the last row in above screenshot. WMI and PS scripts are not available for download. For getting more details about the tasks we recommend to read this.

Store BHM reports in SQL DB

As in MBV, now you have the ability to store your BHM reports in to a SQL Server DB. This feature could be useful to make some statistics and be able to compare the state of the platform between dates. This is a per profile option and can be enabled by going in to Profile settings as shown below:

Once this option is enabled, BHM will store the reports in mentioned SQL DB. You need to specify the SQL Server name where you want to store the reports, you can also change the name of DB. Following is how the SQL DB would look like:

This process is fast and transparent which is done automatically at the end of each collect if this option is enabled. Please note that we don't store "Queries Output" section of your profile in the DB.

The schema of the database to store these reports is quite simple. Each row of each table represents an entry in the corresponding HTML report and a "Date" column store the date of the report generation. Querying the dashboard table can be very interesting to compare the size of the BizTalk databases at different dates, and then using Reporting services, you can really generate nice reports about the evolution of your BizTalk platform.

Support for custom SQL query

In v2 of BHM we introduced the feature of writing your own custom queries. We are extending that feature to allow writing SQL queries as well. So with v3 you can write your own custom query in following scripts:

• WMI query
• VB Script
• PowerShell query
• Batch file (.bat)
• CMD
• SQL

We would like to reiterate that it is not advisable to query BizTalk DB as it can have adverse effect on the overall Performance of BizTalk Server. We are providing this feature to query your own Custom SQL DB.

Force Full Report Option

We are now providing an easy option to collect a full BHM report. It might happen that your profile settings are not configured to collect a full report and without this option you have to manually change the profile settings to collect full report and reverse the settings again. With this feature you don’t need to do any changes at the Profile level, you can just right click on the profile and select “Force Full Analyze”.

Force Full Analyze will give you two options to select from:

• Include Custom Queries and Rules
• Exclude Custom Queries and Rules

As name suggest you can choose if you want to include your custom queries and rules to be part of the full report or not. During the support call with Microsoft we might ask you to collect a full report for diagnostic purpose and you might not want to expose your custom queries and rules, so you can choose not to include them. 

Enhanced query repository

Query repository is the collection of queries and rules which makes the BHM report so comprehensive. We put constant efforts to improve this repository with all the latest identified issues and product updates and releases. Following are few important addition to the repository:

1. Latest CU check for BizTalk Server 2009 and 2010.
2. Product Life Cycle check
3. SQL Server volume and part size statistics

New and Useful BHM Home Page

We have rejuvenate the BHM home page with important links related to BizTalk Health Monitor and other BizTalk Maintenance related articles which could be very handy while administering the BizTalk Server.

Apart from above all noticeable feature, there are number of changes happened at the engine level to make BHM more stable and to give a better experience. We have also fixed all the known and reported issues of v2.

We hope that these features will help you in maintaining and troubleshooting BizTalk Server related issues.

We would love to hear from you for any feedback or suggestions!

You can either write us at bhmteam@microsoft.com or leave your comment here.

As a part of our continue attempt to improve BizTalk Health Monitor, here we are again with new easy-to-setup feature and updated repository. BHM is meant for monitoring and help you find out possible issues with your BizTalk Server environment so it is super important for us to keep the repository updated by adding new queries and rules. Following are the key updates in v3.1:

1-      Easy-To-Setup project for BHM

2-      Improved auto-proposal of maintenance tasks using From latest BHM report

3-      Added View Current Shape of Orchestrations to BHM report

4-      Terminate Caching Items (Hard Termination) to maintenance node

5-      Updated repository with new queries and rules

Easy-To-Setup project for BHM

No manual steps required to get going with BHM! With the new setup project, using BHM and integrate it with BizTalk Admin Console is just a click away - simply run BHMSetup.exe. Following are the step by step guidance on installing BHM with the new setup project:

1. Download BizTalk Health Monitor v3.1 from Microsoft Download Center
2. Launch BHMSetup.exe as an administrator, it will open the installation screen as shown below
3. Under Options you can:
   • change the installation location of BHM
   • choose to create a shortcut of BHM on the desktop
   • choose to launch BHM after the setup is completed
   • choose to include BizTalk Administration Console in BHM MMC. Note, that this doesn’t replace the existing BizTalk Administration Console. Also, this option is not available in BizTalk 2010.  In order to integrate the BizTalk Admin Console with BHM in BizTalk 2010, see “How to integrate BHM SnapIn” section here.
4. Click on “Start Installing” to begin the installation. You will get a message when installation gets completed. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds.
5. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC.

Watch this short video to see how to install BHM with v3.1 and collect an MBV report:

Added View Current Shape of Orchestrations to BHM report 

We have included a script which provides a way to quickly see which shape orchestrations are on without relying on tracking or orchestration debugger. This task relies on the nvcLastAction column in the Instances table which is only available starting BTS2006R2 and is only populated for orchestrations that are either dehydrated, active but dehydratable, or were suspended while dehydratable.  If a certain orchestration does not show up in this list, it does not have any nvcLastAction info associated with it.

Terminate Caching Items (Hard Termination) to maintenance node

The purpose of this task is to handle all cache item cleanup scenarios with one task.  It uses hard termination logic to purge all caching items out of the MsgBox.  This task should clean up cache instances and messages regardless of if they are orphaned, what host they are in, or what state they are in.  More information at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcpr/archive/2015/06/29/biztalk-terminator-still-not-cleaning-up-caching-items.aspx.

Improved auto-proposal of maintenance tasks using “From latest BHM report”

Improvements:

• Better logic to pre-fill parameters for the proposed task (whenever possible)
• Show report date when select “From latest BHM report” to indicate which report it is pointing to.
• Fixed issues related to showing the correct task

Hello! here we are again with an updated version of BizTalk Health Monitor which you can get from BHM download page. One of the main concern that we wanted to address in this version was to avoid too frequent releases, as it may not be possible for everyone to update the BHM setup as frequently. This wasn’t avoidable by far as we wanted to keep it’s repository up-to-date which can help you detect any known issues and to provide you with the latest best practice guidance. With this release of BHM, we are detaching BHM core with it’s repositories. What that means is, from v3.2 onwards you can update the BHM repositories without re-installing BHM. We call this feature as “Auto-Update Repositories” which comes with two modes, online and offline which are explained in detail in this article. Following is the complete list of new features in this release:

1. Auto-Update Repositories
2. Analyze option at the start-up
3. Import existing BHM reports
4. Repository Updates

Auto-Update Repositories

BizTalk Health Monitor makes use of two repositories:

1. Query\Rule repository – Used for analyzing your BizTalk environment and generating the report, same as MBV.
2. Maintenance repository – Used to execute BizTalk Database related maintenance tasks, same as Terminator.

While we will ship these repositories with every BHM release, all the in-between updates to these repositories will be available on Microsoft Azure Cloud, which can be downloaded and used by BizTalk Health Monitor without re-installing the entire setup. This is possible only with v3.2 release and not with the earlier ones. We understand that your BizTalk environment may not have access to the internet, hence it also comes up with an offline way to check for the new updates and download them. You need to manually copy them over to the machine where you have BizTalk Health Monitor installed. We have done some changes to the BHM core to support this feature, let’s have a look at them:

1. Get/Set Repository Updates - You can use this option either to check for the latest repository update available or set the duration of days in which BHM should check for the updates. This option will work only on machines with internet access. To use this feature, right click on BizTalk Health Monitor root node and select “Repository Update”

   This will open a up a new window, as shown following:

   Here you can click on “Check now” which will check for the latest repository available online. If it does, it will provide you an option to download them. If not, it will pop-up a message stating that your repositories are up to date.

   You can also set the number of days in which you want BHM to check for the updated repositories and prompt you if available. Default is 15 days.

2. Check Repository Version– You can check the version of repositories your BHM setup is using by right clicking on BizTalk Health Monitor root node and select “About BizTalk Health Monitor”. This will pop-up a new windows which will show the version of BHM along with it’s repositories. You should refer to “Query/rules repository assembly” and “Maintenance repository assembly”. The date it shows is the last time when the repository was downloaded on your machine.  

    

3. Offline repository check– When you install BHM 3.2 you will get a utility named “ChkBHMRep.exe”. You can find it under the BHM installation folder. In scenarios when you don’t have access to the internet from BHM machine, follow these steps to compare and update the BHM repositories:
   1. Copy following files to the machine with internet access
      1. ChkBHMRep.exe
      2. Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.dll
      3. MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll
      4. MaintenanceRep.dll
   2. Run “ChkBHMRep.exe”

   3. This will compare the version of repository files of your machine with what’s available online and prompt you to download the assemblies if out dated. If you don’t copy the last two files, it will always prompt you to download as it will consider those files as missing. If you have the updated assemblies, it will complete the update check and provide the assemblies version found.

Analyze option at the start-up

We have provided an option to allow user to select BHM profiles that he\she wish to analyze as soon as BHM starts-up. When you install and launch BHM v3.2 for the first time, you will be provided with following pop-up:

Here we will list all the profiles that you have under you BHM root node. By default only the “Default Profile” will be checked and all other profiles that you add later will be unchecked. Here you can:

Select the profiles that you wish to be analyze at the BHM Start-Up

Click “Analyze now” to start the analysis for selected profiles

Click “Ok” to close the dialogue box without starting the analysis and to save the checkbox selections

Use the last check box to choose if you wish to see this pop-up or not

You can also do these settings from your BHM console by right-clicking on the BHM root node and select “Select multiple Profiles to analyze”.

Import existing BHM reports

Now you can use the BHM dashboard to view and analyze an existing BHM or MBV report. When you import a report all the default rules are populated and displayed in the BHM dashboard. Imported reports doesn’t honor any customer rules or dashboard customization. To import an existing report, right click on BHM root node and select “Import existing report”. This will open up a dialog box where you have to provide:

1. Path of the folder where report is saved
2. Name of the report

Repository Updates

We have modified the 3.1 repository to include:

1. Latest CU check for all BizTalk Server versions
2. Updated “Count Instances (and Save Messages)” view task to include instance status filter.
3. Modified the WMI engine to better handles failures in BizTalk WMI API calls. 

For any feedback\suggestions please drop an email to bhmteam@microsoft.com.

Thanks,

BHMTeam

____________________________________________________

Installing BHM v3.2:

1. Download BizTalk Health Monitor from Microsoft Download Center
2. Unzip BHMv3.2.zip by right-clicking on the file and choosing Extract All.
3. In order to avoid this issue, right-click on MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and check Unblock and click OK if you see the following warning:
   
4. Repeat step 3 for MaintenanceRep.dll.
5. Launch BHMSetup.exe as an administrator, it will open the installation screen as shown below
6. Under Options you can:
   • change the installation location of BHM
   • choose to create a shortcut of BHM on the desktop
   • choose to launch BHM after the setup is completed
   • choose to include BizTalk Administration Console in BHM MMC. Note, that this doesn’t replace the existing BizTalk Administration Console. Also, this option is not available in BizTalk 2010.  In order to integrate the BizTalk Admin Console with BHM in BizTalk 2010, see “How to integrate BHM SnapIn” section here.
7. Click on “Start Installing” to begin the installation. You will get a message when installation gets completed. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds.
8. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC.

We'd like to document a known issue that BizTalk Health Monitor v3.2 can run into on Windows 10 and 2012 machines when trying to load the repository files downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center (DLC).

As mentioned here, in BHM v3.2 we decoupled the Query/Rules and Maintenance repositories from the tool itself.  This was done so we could provide repository updates via Azure without having to release a new version of BHM itself.  We still included the latest versions of these repository files with the DLC package. 

Depending on the OS and security configuration, the 2 repository files (MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and MaintenanceRep.dll) can be blocked by the OS when downloaded from DLC and cause the below mentioned issues. 

Scroll to the bottom to see the solution.

When adding a new profile:

MMC has detected an error in a snap-in and will unload it.

Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Exception type: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException

 When modifying profile settings:

Information level tab is missing query list under "Query Level" label:

Queries tab is missing query list:

Rules tab is missing rules list:

When connecting to BizTalk from the Maintenance node:

Error to load the Maintenance repository :Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\BizTalkHealthMonitor\MaintenanceRep.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)

SOLUTION:

Tell Windows not to block these 2 repository files.

1. Close BHM
2. Go to the BHM installation folder (default is C:\Program Files (x86)\BizTalkHealthMonitor)
3. Right-click on MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and go to properties
4. Note the security warning at the bottom:
   
5. Check Unblock and click OK.
6. Also follow steps 3-5 for MaintenanceRep.dll

Once you have unblocked the file, you should no longer see the security warning when you go back into file properties and all of the above mentioned errors related to loading repositories should be resolved.

Notes:

• If you have not yet installed BHM v3.2, you can also follow the above steps on the unzipped package prior to installing BHM.
• In some cases, we've seen that the "Unblock" option is not there when BHMv3.2.zip was unzipped using a 3rd party tool.  To unzip, right-click on BHMv3.2.zip and choose Extract All.

BizTalk 2013 R2 ships with a new tool called “BizTalk Health Monitor”. BHM is also available as a standalone download for BizTalk Server 2013 and 2010.

In this post we will learn:

1-     Where to find BizTalk Health Monitor

2-     How to register BizTalk Health Monitor SnapIn

3-     How to integrate BHM SnapIn to BizTalk Admin Console

Where to find BizTalk Health Monitor

On BizTalk 2013 R2, BHM can be found at the following location: 

<installationdrive>\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013 R2\SDK\Utilities\Support Tools\BizTalkHealthMonitor

Another option is to download the standalone version from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43716 and unzip it onto the machine

(Updated on 7/7/2015 : With BHM v3.1 you no longer need to do rest of the manual steps mentioned in this article to get started with BHM. The recommended way to setup BHM is via BHMSetup.exe. Read this article for complete details. However, if you are on BizTalk 2010 you need to follow the manual steps shown here to integrate BizTalk Admin Console and BHM)

How to register BizTalk Health Monitor SnapIn

We can use InstallUtil.exe which comes with BizTalk Health Monitor tool to register the BHM snap in. Follow these steps to register the snap-in:

1-     Open a command prompt as an administrator

2-     Navigate to the location of BHM

3-     Type InstallUtil.exe MBVSnapIn.dll and hit enter. This step will do some registry changes and register the SnapIn to be used

How to integrate BHM SnapIn to BizTalk Admin Console

(Updated on 3/10/2015 : Few issues have been reported with the method shown to Integrate BizTalk Admin Console and BHM in to same MMC. So we are updating this column with the new steps as mentioned by Sandro in his blog to address those issues.)

By now we have already registered the BHM SnapIn and now we will integrate this to be used with BizTalk Administration Console.

Before we proceed please note that BHM SnapIn can be used independently and need not to be integrated with BizTalk Administration Console. We are showing this step more from convenience point of view.

1-     From Run, type mmc /32 and press enter. This will open a new MMC window.

2-     From MMC console, go to File menu and select “Options…” option

• In the text box, replace “Console1” for “BizTalk Administration Console”

• In the Console mode combo box, select “User mode – full access”

• And confirm that the option “Do not save changes to this console” is uncheck

3-     Go to File–>Add/Remove Snap-in

4-     From the Add or Remove Snap-ins Window add following snap-ins and then click Ok

a. Microsoft BizTalk Server Administration

b. BizTalk Health Monitor  

c. Event Viewer

5-     By now your new MMC is ready which shows BizTalk Server Administration, BizTalk Health Monitor and Event viewer

6-     Now you might want to save this as a new .msc file so that you don’t have to repeat these steps again. For that, go to File–>Save As option, give a name and then save it. However, it is recommended that you save it with the name “BTSmmc.msc” otherwise you can run in to the issue as mentioned in  the Known Issues with BizTalk Health Monitor page. To save the console as BTSmmc.msc do the following:

• Firstly navigate to BizTalk installation folder e.g. C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013R2

• Rename BTSmmc.msc, e.g. BTSmmc-old.msc

• Now save your new (BizTalk Admin Console + BHM) mmc with the name BTSmmc.msc under the BizTalk installation folder e.g. C:\Program Files(x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2013R2\BTSmmc.msc

7-     From next time onwards, you can use this new .msc file to open you BizTalk Admin Console which will be incorporated with the BizTalk Health Monitor. OR if you have saved it with BTSmmc.msc, you can directly open the BizTalk Administration Console which will be incorporated with the BizTalk Health Monitor (recommended)

Presentation

You probably already know or use “MsgBoxViewer” (aka “MBV”), a windows based application gathering all information of a BizTalk group and detecting any issues, non-critical or critical warnings. It is vital for a BizTalk administrator to have complete and detailed knowledge of a BizTalk group at any time, and detect any potential problems in advance. MBV has been perfectly achieving this task; but it remains a separated tool with its own user interface and HTML output and you have to run it periodically.

After releasing MBV as a standalone tool for several years,  the MBV project team decided to integrate it more closely with the BizTalk Administration Console to provide BizTalk administrators  a quick and complete dashboard of a BizTalk group which will help them monitor the health of their BizTalk platform.

 A new BizTalk snap-in, named “BizTalk Health Monitor” (aka “BHM”), has so been created to help you easily monitor the health of your BizTalk environment. BHM is based on the same engine as MBV. This snap-in can be added to the existing BizTalk Administration Console or can be run individually in its own MMC window. Visit this post to learn more about how to register the BHM MMC with BizTalk MMC.

 The first version of BHM is included in BizTalk 2013 R2 in the “Support tools” folder but updates will be released periodically with new features (and fixes if needed). The first update is almost ready and should be available soon.

 Following are the major features of BHM:

• Monitor Multiple BizTalk Environments
• Generate and View MBV reports
• Dashboard view for overall health of BizTalk Environments
• Schedule Report Collection
• Send Email Notifications
• Performance Monitor integration with pre-loaded scenario-based Performance counters
• Report Management

Below is the detailed list of these features but we will go more in-depth for each feature in future posts.

Monitor multiple BizTalk Environments

BHM Snap-in allows monitoring multiple BizTalk environments from a single MMC. When you register BHM on a BizTalk server, by default it will add a “group” node representing the current BizTalk group configured for this server. You can however add additional nodes corresponding to different BizTalk groups by specifying its name, the location of its Management database and the output folder.

Each group node will have its own customized settings in term of its level of information to collect, its level of information to display, its type of notifications to enable, or its type of performance data to collect.

This feature allows you to monitor multiple BizTalk platforms  like Production and Pre-Production BizTalk groups from single MMC.

Generate and View MBV report

 Once a group node is added in the BHM hierarchy, you can start immediately to analyze its corresponding BizTalk group by right-clicking on the node and select the “Analyze now” menu item.

The analysis consists of running a number of queries to collect all important information of the BizTalk group, evaluating a set of rules for each of them, and raising any warnings (critical or not) if there is any.
Note: The engine, the queries, and rules repository are the same as used by MBV.

 Each time an analysis process is completed, a child node report is added in the group node. Each child report has further sub-nodes to present the collected information:

• Critical Warnings
• Warnings
• Summary
• Topology
• Queries

This sub-nodes list details depends on the level of information you selected to display in BHM. The property page Information level of the group node settings allows you to select which sub-nodes you want to display for each generated report, and the level of information to collect during the analysis process (as shown below). The more queries you select to include in the analysis, the more information and potentially more warnings BHM will raise.

You can so customize as you want the level of information to analyze and display in BHM for each added group node.

This is for example the output of the Topology sub-node :

Dashboard view for overall health of BizTalk Environment

 The output of the “Analyze Now” action will also generate a dashboard (as shown below) presenting a quick summary all the information you need to know about the BizTalk platform. We have categorized the information under different tiles as their names suggest. Each tile will be presented with a small icon on the bottom right of the tile which represents the overall health of that category. A green right mark shows that this category is healthy. A yellow exclamation sign represents some non-critical warnings whereas a red exclamation represents some critical warnings which need immediate attention. You can click on these tiles to get additional details on the lower pane.

Schedule Report collection

 A BizTalk platform processing messages 24×7 needs to be monitored at least daily. BHM provides you a way to create a scheduled task to automate a periodic collection of BHM report.

The property page Schedule of the group node settings provides an option to enable a scheduled analyze. This schedule task can be of course modified then in the Windows Task Scheduler.

Send Email Notifications

Receiving by mail the list of warning that MBV generates is a feature that has been demanded by lot of MBV users. We have incorporated this feature in BHM where you have an option to send the dashboard and the list of warnings to an email address after a fresh analysis.

BHM provides so an option to send automatically by mail the dashboard and the list of warnings after a fresh analysis. You can enable and configure this feature from the property page of the group node settings (select the “Settings” menu item when right clicking on a group node). An email will also be sent each time if you have scheduled the BHM report collection.

 We have also provided a Test button which you can use to test the SMTP settings you have entered. It will send a test email to make sure that SMPT settings are correct.

Perfmon integration with pre-loaded scenario based Performance counters

 BizTalk provides a large number of performance counters to monitor like the state of the BizTalk databases, the BizTalk queues, the messaging and XLANG performances, the  throttling states, the adapters performances etc…There are various such counters available but they are less known and visible to the BizTalk administrators.

 BHM directly integrates Perfmon tool in its own MMC which provides a quick and easy way to monitor these counters. Furthermore, for each group node, BHM provides you a list of predefined views with pre-selected counters that you can quickly display at any time.

BHM will let you display either the current activity of the monitored BizTalk platform, or a recorded performance activity.

• Current activity

  When the current activity node is selected, you can choose a BizTalk server belonging to the monitored BizTalk group or any server you want. BHM provides default tabs in the current activity view with default counters but you can create your own tabs with your own counters  (right-click on tab to display the context-menu and create a new one).

• Recorded activity

BHM can also automate the recording of a perfmon activity for a given period. You can enable and configure this feature from the property page Recorded Performance activity of the group node settings (as show below).

BHM provides you a set of pre-defined scenarios with selected performance counters and you can choose the preferred scenario. You can also add your own counters if you chose the custom scenario option. The property page allows you to configure the sample interval and the duration of the recorded activity.

Once the recorded activity is configured, BHM can automate the creation, the start & stop of a performance log file corresponding to the selected scenario. When the recorded activity is completed, you can display it inside BHM by selecting the corresponding sub-node (as show below).

BizTalk Health Monitor is a snap-in which can be used to monitor a BizTalk environment. For more information about BHM, see this link.

BHM was originally released with BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and now we have released a standalone version of BHM for use with BizTalk Server 2010 and BizTalk Server 2013. You can download the standalone version of BHM from this link. The registration process of BHM is same as it was for BizTalk 2013 R2. Visit this link for more details.

BHM has been tested and is supported on BizTalk 2010, BizTalk 2013 and BizTalk 2013 R2. It may work for other versions of BizTalk Server, however it won’t be officially supported.

BizTalk Health Monitor MMC snap-in is available since June 2014 with the release of BizTalk Server 2013 R2 and also as a standalone version for BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013. This first version was developed based on the known MBV engine to provide out of the box way to administer your BizTalk environment. BHM gives you a powerful dashboard to monitor the health of your BizTalk group. For more details on BHM and its features visit this post. We collected lot of feedbacks from BHM users to enrich BHM with new features, at the same time made it more reliable to provide a better experience. This post will concentrate on all the new features of BHM with v2.

This version will be available to download for BizTalk Server 2010 and 2013 from BHM download link whereas it will be released for 2013 R2 with the upcoming cumulative update.

Following is the list of new features with BHM v2. Click on each feature to get more details:

1. Customized Dashboard – Now you can customize your dashboard by adding\removing\resizing custom tiles.
2. Custom Queries – You can add your own queries to the BHM to make it more personalize and enrich the out of the box BHM query repository.
3. Custom Rules – BHM v2 will also allow you to add custom rules on your custom queries or existing BHM queries so you can easily monitor your environment specific information.
4. Profiles enhancements – You can create multiple profiles to monitor a single or multiple BizTalk groups. Based on customers feedback we have made some enhancements in the profile management:
1. Now you can add the option to specify a different user under which BHM should collect the report.
2. We also moved the report management from BHM to per profile level so that you can manage the BHM reports for each profile separately.
3. You can easily create a copy of a profile and reuse it for other group or some other modifications.
4. You now have an option to select if you want to create the HTML page. You can uncheck this option to preserve disk space.
5. Renamed it from “Group” to “Profile”

Customized Dashboard

First version of BHM Dashboard comes up with seven default tiles showing categorized information about the BizTalk group. With this version we have given an option to add your own custom tiles. These custom tiles can be created to display any entries from the Warnings, Summary or Query output sections of BHM. This can be done by just a right click on one or more selected entries of these views. You can either pin them to a new or existing custom tiles on your dashboard to display output of a specific query or the portion of the summary report or warnings.  

This feature is useful for a quick display of some critical information of your specific environment in the dashboard view of a given profile. Custom tiles are displayed in green color and can be resized, renamed, removed by just a right click on it.

Another important point is that this customization is done per profile so it gives you a lot of flexibility in customization.

 Like default tiles, each list view (bottom second half of the dashboard) entry of a custom tile provides an hyperlink to the source query and also an hyperlink to the rule which produced it and you can in one click disable the rule. We haven’t put any limit on the number of custom tiles you can have on the dashboard and you can’t remove\rename the default tiles but you can resize them.

This is a sample of dashboard customization:

Let’s have a look at what you can pin and how you can pin custom tiles to the dashboard:

Following are the items which can be pinned to the BHM dashboard:

1. Warnings and Critical Warning sections
2. Summary Report sections
3. Any query from the query report
4. Any specific row of the query from query report

The steps to add a custom tile for first three are pretty much same. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Select the item that you would like to add as a custom tile on the dashboard.
2. Right click on the item and then select “Pin to the dashboard”
3. This gives you an option to either add a new tile or add to an existing tile

Following are the snapshots of how it can be done in all the three cases:

Warnings and Critical Warning sections

Summary Report sections

Any query output from the query report

Notes:

If you pin a query output in its own tile, the entire content of the query output will be displayed in the dashboard when selecting the custom tile. If however you add a query in an existing tile, only a link entry to the query will be added in the list view of the custom tile.

Multiple query output links from the query report

Any specific row of the query from query report

You can also choose to display some specific row(s) from a query output by clicking on a custom tile.

For example you can chose to display some specific send ports with their names and status by just selecting their rows in the Send ports query and adding them to the dashboard.

To achieve that:

• expand the Queries output node of an existing report and then expand the category node of the query.
• Select the query to display its rows in the MMC detail view (right side)
• Select and right click on one or more rows which you want to add as a custom tile.
• Select “Pint to dashboard” to display the context menu.
• Select which columns you want to show as Caption and its corresponding Values.

In the end this is how the customized dashboard looks like:

BHM Repository customization

This is another important feature of BHM v2: the possibility to add your own queries and rules in the repository of BHM. You can very quickly add your own custom queries in the query repository of a given profile and create your own rules, selecting existing or custom source queries.

Custom queries

BHM repository has a collection of almost 200 queries and now with v2 you have an option to build and add your own queries to this repository. The type of a custom query you can add are:

• WMI query
• VB Script
• PowerShell query
• Batch file (.bat)
• CMD

 Once a custom query is added in a profile, it will be saved in that profile and visible in the query tree view of the “Information Level” of the profile settings and can be checked or unchecked, like any native queries of BHM. And like any native BHM queries, a custom query can be pinned to a dashboard.

To add a custom query:

• Right click on the Profile select Settings.
• Select the “Queries” tab which also list all the BHM queries.
• Click on the button “New <query type>”
• Fill the query body in the new query Dialog Box and test your query
• Validate the query Dialog Box
• The query will be visible at that time in the tree view of the information level tab so that you can check it to include in the collect statement
• Validate the settings page to persist the custom query in your profile

You can of course edit or remove custom queries

Notes:

• Only WMI queries allow you to specify a target server; for the other types of query, execution will be local to the server running BHM.
• Only WMI queries will create columns in the query output; for the other types of query, the output will be on a unique columns named “Output” (this possibility exists in MBV engine used by BHM but not yet exposed)
• Each query of BHM can be quickly tested using the “Test” button in the tab “Queries” 

Custom Rules

BHM engine has a repository of rules which are applied on its queries and are displayed in the report accordingly. Out of the box BHM comes up with around 450 rules which does various kind of checks on your BizTalk environment. And if that’s not enough BHM v2 will give you an option to write your own custom rules on existing or custom queries.

A Rule in BHM is a set of conditions (AND between the conditions) checking each row of a query output, and a set of triggered actions if all the conditions are validated. Each rule target a query and will be executed at the end of the query execution, parsing each row of the query output to validate the conditions.

A condition is composed of two fields to compare using a predicate. One field represent the column value to check for the current parsed row and the other field is the value to compare with. The predicate can be selected among a given list. You can add as many conditions as you want, and if all the conditions are validated for a parsed row then the rule will trigger some actions.

You can create tree types of action:

• Add an entry in the summary or warnings sections  (if the information level field  is a warning)
• Add an entry in the topology section
• Spawn a process

Follow this to add a rule:

• Right click on the Profile and select settings.
• Select the tab “Rules” listing all the BHM rules and their source query.
• Click on the button “Add custom rule”
• Select the target query, click ok.
• Fill the rule properties, conditions and actions in the rule Dialog Box
• Test your rule : an HTML view will be displayed with the query output and the Summary & warnings sections
• Validate that the rule is added to the rules list view
• Validate at the settings page that the rule is persisted as a custom rule in your profile

You can of course edit or remove custom rules

Notes:

• You can also add a rule by right clicking on a query in the queries output node
• To help you creating your own rule, we recommend to look at the details of existing native rules of BHM :

For example select any rule targeting the query “BizTalk events in last hours” and then click on the button “Show Rule details”. You can then select each condition and actions of the rules and see their details.

• Some rules of BHM will not display conditions because they are coded in a custom assembly.
• Because of only AND logic between the conditions and of the limited number of predicates available, complex custom rule cannot be created using the rule Dialog Box.

MBV engine used by BHM allows to create complex rules in custom assemblies but this feature is not yet exposed in BHM.

Profile enhancements

Profile nodes

BHM v1 allowed you to create additional group nodes in the BHM MMC to target different BizTalk groups and specify different level of information to collect. We extended this notion to name it as “Profiles” where you can continue to target different BizTalk group but also different sets of customization settings. You can so create multiple profiles targeting a same BizTalk group but having different level of information to collect (different queries created and selected, different rules enabled, etc..)

This is the new settings Dialog Box of a given profile:

Report management

We have moved the BHM report management option from MMC to profiles level. So you can manage your BHM reports per profile basis and mention different specify retention period for your reports. This change be useful if you target different BizTalk groups in you profiles.

Profile Duplication

An existing profile can be now quickly be copied over to create a new profile. This feature is interesting if you want to reuse an existing profile settings for monitoring other BizTalk groups.

To do this, just right click on a the profile and select the menu item “Duplicate profile”

Do not generate HTML files

BHM now provides an option in the “Information Level” tab of the profile settings Dialog Box to not generate BHM HTML files during a collect (analyze). This option can preserve disk space for each report generated in the profile output folder, but you will not be able to open reports in the browser however.

This post is used to list the known issues reported in the last version of BizTalk Health Monitor (currently the v2) and when possible workarounds.
You can let in this post your comments if you want to report new issues.
We will update periodically BHM to fix them and bring also new features.

Known issues:

When a user account is specified to schedule a BHM collect, the creation of the task returns the following error: “A specified logon session does not  exist. It may already have been terminated“. 

The policy “Do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication” is maybe enabled preventing to create a task under a specific user account.
If it is a local policy and if you can disable it, follow these steps :

- Open the ‘Local Security Policies’ MMC
- Expand ‘Local Policies’ and select ‘Security Options’
- Disable that property – the system must reboot for the change to take effect

BHM on a localized OS is hanging and crashing when creating a new monitoring profile. 

The root cause was identified and fixed. We will release soon a post V2 update fixing that problem.
Users who want a temporary fix can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).

BHM on a localized OS is displaying an error message when creating the collect scheduled task even if the task is well created.

The root cause was identified and fixed. We will release soon a post V2 update fixing that problem.
Users who want a temporary fix can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).

BHM on a localized OS is not displaying the performance counters in the interactive performance view.

Performance counters are localized and BHM provides only a list of US counters for the moment; they are however pending localization for the main languages.
To workaround that issue, you can add manually these counters in the performance view reusing the ones added on a US server.

When we create a monitoring profile targeting a BizTalk group not accessible by the logged-on user, the  console is crashing.

During the creation of a profile, BHM connects to the Mgmt db of the targeted group to retrieve the list of BizTalk servers of that group – this list will be used in the performance nodes.
This connection attempt made under the interactive logged-on user account is failing because this user does not have rights on the Mgmt Db, and this error is not well catched.
We will release soon a post V2 update allowing to specify the user account in the new profile dialogbox and managing better connection errors.

You should be able workaround that issue by editing manually an XML profile file following the steps below  :

- Duplicate an existing profile using the new “duplicate profile” menu item

- open a CMD window under elevated admin priviledge

- in this cmd change the folder to “c:\programdata\Microsoft\BizTalk Health Monitor”

- open in notepad the XML file corresponding to this duplicated profile

- modify in this xml file the value of MGMTDBSERVER and MGMTDBNAME properties to specify the location of the new Mgmt db you want to target

- modify the value of the “DEFAULTBTS” property entering the name of one BizTalk server of that new targeted group

- modify the value of the “ALLBTS” property entering this same BizTalk server or the complete list of all your BTS of the new targeted group, ex : Value=”BTSRV1:True:True:True, BTSRV2:False:False:True”

- save the xml file

- Open BHM console : you should see then the new profile listed

- Display the Settings dialogbox of the new profile and specify the user to run the collect as

There is no SSL usage option in the mail notifications settings

An option to use SSL will be added in the next public version of BHM; in the meantime users who want a temporary build implementing that option can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).

Error when creating a scheduled analyze task if the username or password contains some special chars like ‘&’

This issue is fixed in the next version which will be available very soon.
To workaround that issue, you can avoid specifying the user name and password when enabling the task in BHM, and then edit manually the created BHM task in the Task Scheduler application to run the task under a specific user account.

We are proud to announce the release of v3 for BizTalk Health Monitor which can be downloaded and used to monitor and maintain BizTalk Server environments. We released the v2 of BHM during November last year with lots of customizable features which gives you an option to write your own queries and rules. For v3 of BHM we wanted to provide some additional functionality which not just help you finding a problem but also gives you an option to resolve it. And what could be a better option other than well-known “Terminator”. Terminator is the only supported tool from Microsoft which can be used to resolve various database integrity issues within your BizTalk Databases. You can read more about Terminator here.

This post will concentrate on all the new features of BizTalk Health Monitor with v3.

Following is the list of new features included in v3 of BHM. You can click on each feature to read more about its usage:

1. Terminator Integration
2. Store BHM reports in SQL DB
3. Support for custom SQL query
4. Force Full Report Option
5. Enhanced query repository
6. New and Useful BHM homepage 

Terminator Integration

BizTalk Health Monitor now come up with a new node named as “Maintenance” which integrates the Terminator tool.

We have kept the look and feel of the Maintenance node pretty much same as Terminator with few notifications enhancements. You can start with selecting an existing BHM profile for which you want to run any Maintenance task. It is required that all of the following are true before you run any Maintenance task:

Once all is selected you can click on Connect to proceed further.

Once you click on Connect, you can see the Terminator like interface where you can choose any of the available task for execution. There are basically five types of Tasks you can choose from:

1. View (Default)
2. Performance
3. Manage
4. Delete
5. From latest BHM Report

View Tasks – These tasks can be used to query your BizTalk Databases on various counters without making any modifications. List of available View Tasks are:

Performance Tasks – Performance tasks can be used to modify any performance related parameters for your BizTalk Server. List of available Performance Tasks are:

Manage Tasks – These tasks can be used to manage BizTalk DB related operations. Executing these tasks may make modifications to your existing BizTalk DBs. List of available Manage Tasks are:

Delete Tasks – Tasks under this category can be used to resolve BizTalk DB integrity related issues. You need to be very cautious while selecting any of these tasks as selecting and executing wrong task may have adverse effect on your BizTalk DB. To help you choose the right task we have provide complete details of the task under the Description tab. List of available Delete tasks are:

From Latest BHM Report – When you select this task, the Task List drop down will be populated with the list of identified tasks for selected profile that can be resolved by Maintenance engine. The list is captured from the latest BHM report. This is the same option that was previously available for MBV and Terminator integration. You can read more about this option here.

Following screenshot will show you the typical flow of executing a task in Maintenance node, once you are connected:

1. Use this dropdown to view and select a task types from various available tasks types
2. Use this dropdown to view and select a task from various available tasks for selected task types
3. Once you select the task at step#2 Description tab will give you complete details about the selected task
4. You can use Parameters tab to feed in parameters to the task, if required.
5. Once you feed in the parameters, you can click on Execute Task to start Task Execution.
6. Once the task is completed you can view the output of the task under Results tab.
7. Once the task execution is completed you can click on Disconnect to close the Maintenance node.

There are three types of scripts that has been used to write terminator tasks:

1. SQL
2. WMI
3. PowerShell

You can view and download the SQL script from the last row in above screenshot. WMI and PS scripts are not available for download. For getting more details about the tasks we recommend to read this.

Store BHM reports in SQL DB

As in MBV, now you have the ability to store your BHM reports in to a SQL Server DB. This feature could be useful to make some statistics and be able to compare the state of the platform between dates. This is a per profile option and can be enabled by going in to Profile settings as shown below:

Once this option is enabled, BHM will store the reports in mentioned SQL DB. You need to specify the SQL Server name where you want to store the reports, you can also change the name of DB. Following is how the SQL DB would look like:

This process is fast and transparent which is done automatically at the end of each collect if this option is enabled. Please note that we don’t store “Queries Output” section of your profile in the DB.

The schema of the database to store these reports is quite simple. Each row of each table represents an entry in the corresponding HTML report and a “Date” column store the date of the report generation. Querying the dashboard table can be very interesting to compare the size of the BizTalk databases at different dates, and then using Reporting services, you can really generate nice reports about the evolution of your BizTalk platform.

Support for custom SQL query

In v2 of BHM we introduced the feature of writing your own custom queries. We are extending that feature to allow writing SQL queries as well. So with v3 you can write your own custom query in following scripts:

• WMI query
• VB Script
• PowerShell query
• Batch file (.bat)
• CMD
• SQL

We would like to reiterate that it is not advisable to query BizTalk DB as it can have adverse effect on the overall Performance of BizTalk Server. We are providing this feature to query your own Custom SQL DB.

Force Full Report Option

We are now providing an easy option to collect a full BHM report. It might happen that your profile settings are not configured to collect a full report and without this option you have to manually change the profile settings to collect full report and reverse the settings again. With this feature you don’t need to do any changes at the Profile level, you can just right click on the profile and select “Force Full Analyze”.

Force Full Analyze will give you two options to select from:

• Include Custom Queries and Rules
• Exclude Custom Queries and Rules

As name suggest you can choose if you want to include your custom queries and rules to be part of the full report or not. During the support call with Microsoft we might ask you to collect a full report for diagnostic purpose and you might not want to expose your custom queries and rules, so you can choose not to include them. 

Enhanced query repository

Query repository is the collection of queries and rules which makes the BHM report so comprehensive. We put constant efforts to improve this repository with all the latest identified issues and product updates and releases. Following are few important addition to the repository:

1. Latest CU check for BizTalk Server 2009 and 2010.
2. Product Life Cycle check
3. SQL Server volume and part size statistics

New and Useful BHM Home Page

We have rejuvenate the BHM home page with important links related to BizTalk Health Monitor and other BizTalk Maintenance related articles which could be very handy while administering the BizTalk Server.

Apart from above all noticeable feature, there are number of changes happened at the engine level to make BHM more stable and to give a better experience. We have also fixed all the known and reported issues of v2.

We hope that these features will help you in maintaining and troubleshooting BizTalk Server related issues.

We would love to hear from you for any feedback or suggestions!

You can either write us at bhmteam@microsoft.com or leave your comment here.

As a part of our continue attempt to improve BizTalk Health Monitor, here we are again with new easy-to-setup feature and updated repository. BHM is meant for monitoring and help you find out possible issues with your BizTalk Server environment so it is super important for us to keep the repository updated by adding new queries and rules. Following are the key updates in v3.1:

1-      Easy-To-Setup project for BHM

2-      Improved auto-proposal of maintenance tasks using From latest BHM report

3-      Added View Current Shape of Orchestrations to BHM report

4-      Terminate Caching Items (Hard Termination) to maintenance node

5-      Updated repository with new queries and rules

Easy-To-Setup project for BHM

No manual steps required to get going with BHM! With the new setup project, using BHM and integrate it with BizTalk Admin Console is just a click away – simply run BHMSetup.exe. Following are the step by step guidance on installing BHM with the new setup project:

1. Download BizTalk Health Monitor v3.1 from Microsoft Download Center
2. Launch BHMSetup.exe as an administrator, it will open the installation screen as shown below
3. Under Options you can:
   • change the installation location of BHM
   • choose to create a shortcut of BHM on the desktop
   • choose to launch BHM after the setup is completed
   • choose to include BizTalk Administration Console in BHM MMC. Note, that this doesn’t replace the existing BizTalk Administration Console. Also, this option is not available in BizTalk 2010.  In order to integrate the BizTalk Admin Console with BHM in BizTalk 2010, see “How to integrate BHM SnapIn” section here.
4. Click on “Start Installing” to begin the installation. You will get a message when installation gets completed. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds.
5. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC.

Watch this short video to see how to install BHM with v3.1 and collect an MBV report:

Added View Current Shape of Orchestrations to BHM report 

We have included a script which provides a way to quickly see which shape orchestrations are on without relying on tracking or orchestration debugger. This task relies on the nvcLastAction column in the Instances table which is only available starting BTS2006R2 and is only populated for orchestrations that are either dehydrated, active but dehydratable, or were suspended while dehydratable.  If a certain orchestration does not show up in this list, it does not have any nvcLastAction info associated with it.

Terminate Caching Items (Hard Termination) to maintenance node

The purpose of this task is to handle all cache item cleanup scenarios with one task.  It uses hard termination logic to purge all caching items out of the MsgBox.  This task should clean up cache instances and messages regardless of if they are orphaned, what host they are in, or what state they are in.  More information at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcpr/archive/2015/06/29/biztalk-terminator-still-not-cleaning-up-caching-items.aspx.

Improved auto-proposal of maintenance tasks using “From latest BHM report”

Improvements:

• Better logic to pre-fill parameters for the proposed task (whenever possible)
• Show report date when select “From latest BHM report” to indicate which report it is pointing to.
• Fixed issues related to showing the correct task

Hello! here we are again with an updated version of BizTalk Health Monitor which you can get from BHM download page. One of the main concern that we wanted to address in this version was to avoid too frequent releases, as it may not be possible for everyone to update the BHM setup as frequently. This wasn’t avoidable by far as we wanted to keep it’s repository up-to-date which can help you detect any known issues and to provide you with the latest best practice guidance. With this release of BHM, we are detaching BHM core with it’s repositories. What that means is, from v3.2 onwards you can update the BHM repositories without re-installing BHM. We call this feature as “Auto-Update Repositories” which comes with two modes, online and offline which are explained in detail in this article. Following is the complete list of new features in this release:

1. Auto-Update Repositories
2. Analyze option at the start-up
3. Import existing BHM reports
4. Repository Updates

Auto-Update Repositories

BizTalk Health Monitor makes use of two repositories:

1. Query\Rule repository – Used for analyzing your BizTalk environment and generating the report, same as MBV.
2. Maintenance repository – Used to execute BizTalk Database related maintenance tasks, same as Terminator.

While we will ship these repositories with every BHM release, all the in-between updates to these repositories will be available on Microsoft Azure Cloud, which can be downloaded and used by BizTalk Health Monitor without re-installing the entire setup. This is possible only with v3.2 release and not with the earlier ones. We understand that your BizTalk environment may not have access to the internet, hence it also comes up with an offline way to check for the new updates and download them. You need to manually copy them over to the machine where you have BizTalk Health Monitor installed. We have done some changes to the BHM core to support this feature, let’s have a look at them:

1. Get/Set Repository Updates – You can use this option either to check for the latest repository update available or set the duration of days in which BHM should check for the updates. This option will work only on machines with internet access. To use this feature, right click on BizTalk Health Monitor root node and select “Repository Update”

   This will open a up a new window, as shown following:

   Here you can click on “Check now” which will check for the latest repository available online. If it does, it will provide you an option to download them. If not, it will pop-up a message stating that your repositories are up to date.

   You can also set the number of days in which you want BHM to check for the updated repositories and prompt you if available. Default is 15 days.

2. Check Repository Version – You can check the version of repositories your BHM setup is using by right clicking on BizTalk Health Monitor root node and select “About BizTalk Health Monitor”. This will pop-up a new windows which will show the version of BHM along with it’s repositories. You should refer to “Query/rules repository assembly” and “Maintenance repository assembly”. The date it shows is the last time when the repository was downloaded on your machine.  

    

3. Offline repository check– When you install BHM 3.2 you will get a utility named “ChkBHMRep.exe”. You can find it under the BHM installation folder. In scenarios when you don’t have access to the internet from BHM machine, follow these steps to compare and update the BHM repositories:
   1. Copy following files to the machine with internet access
      1. ChkBHMRep.exe
      2. Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.dll
      3. MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll
      4. MaintenanceRep.dll
   2. Run “ChkBHMRep.exe”

   3. This will compare the version of repository files of your machine with what’s available online and prompt you to download the assemblies if out dated. If you don’t copy the last two files, it will always prompt you to download as it will consider those files as missing. If you have the updated assemblies, it will complete the update check and provide the assemblies version found.

Analyze option at the start-up

We have provided an option to allow user to select BHM profiles that he\she wish to analyze as soon as BHM starts-up. When you install and launch BHM v3.2 for the first time, you will be provided with following pop-up:

Here we will list all the profiles that you have under you BHM root node. By default only the “Default Profile” will be checked and all other profiles that you add later will be unchecked. Here you can:

Select the profiles that you wish to be analyze at the BHM Start-Up

Click “Analyze now” to start the analysis for selected profiles

Click “Ok” to close the dialogue box without starting the analysis and to save the checkbox selections

Use the last check box to choose if you wish to see this pop-up or not

You can also do these settings from your BHM console by right-clicking on the BHM root node and select “Select multiple Profiles to analyze”.

Import existing BHM reports

Now you can use the BHM dashboard to view and analyze an existing BHM or MBV report. When you import a report all the default rules are populated and displayed in the BHM dashboard. Imported reports doesn’t honor any customer rules or dashboard customization. To import an existing report, right click on BHM root node and select “Import existing report”. This will open up a dialog box where you have to provide:

1. Path of the folder where report is saved
2. Name of the report

Repository Updates

We have modified the 3.1 repository to include:

1. Latest CU check for all BizTalk Server versions
2. Updated “Count Instances (and Save Messages)” view task to include instance status filter.
3. Modified the WMI engine to better handles failures in BizTalk WMI API calls. 

For any feedback\suggestions please drop an email to bhmteam@microsoft.com.

Thanks,

BHMTeam

____________________________________________________

Installing BHM v3.2:

1. Download BizTalk Health Monitor from Microsoft Download Center
2. Unzip BHMv3.2.zip by right-clicking on the file and choosing Extract All.
3. In order to avoid this issue, right-click on MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and check Unblock and click OK if you see the following warning:
   
4. Repeat step 3 for MaintenanceRep.dll.
5. Launch BHMSetup.exe as an administrator, it will open the installation screen as shown below
6. Under Options you can:
   • change the installation location of BHM
   • choose to create a shortcut of BHM on the desktop
   • choose to launch BHM after the setup is completed
   • choose to include BizTalk Administration Console in BHM MMC. Note, that this doesn’t replace the existing BizTalk Administration Console. Also, this option is not available in BizTalk 2010.  In order to integrate the BizTalk Admin Console with BHM in BizTalk 2010, see “How to integrate BHM SnapIn” section here.
7. Click on “Start Installing” to begin the installation. You will get a message when installation gets completed. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds.
8. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC.

We’d like to document a known issue that BizTalk Health Monitor v3.2 can run into on Windows 10 and 2012 machines when trying to load the repository files downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center (DLC).

As mentioned here, in BHM v3.2 we decoupled the Query/Rules and Maintenance repositories from the tool itself.  This was done so we could provide repository updates via Azure without having to release a new version of BHM itself.  We still included the latest versions of these repository files with the DLC package. 

Depending on the OS and security configuration, the 2 repository files (MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and MaintenanceRep.dll) can be blocked by the OS when downloaded from DLC and cause the below mentioned issues. 

Scroll to the bottom to see the solution.

When adding a new profile:

MMC has detected an error in a snap-in and will unload it.

Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Exception type: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException

 When modifying profile settings:

Information level tab is missing query list under “Query Level” label:

Queries tab is missing query list:

Rules tab is missing rules list:

When connecting to BizTalk from the Maintenance node:

Error to load the Maintenance repository :Could not load file or assembly ‘file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\BizTalkHealthMonitor\MaintenanceRep.dll’ or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)

SOLUTION:

Tell Windows not to block these 2 repository files.

1. Close BHM
2. Go to the BHM installation folder (default is C:\Program Files (x86)\BizTalkHealthMonitor)
3. Right-click on MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and go to properties
4. Note the security warning at the bottom:
   
5. Check Unblock and click OK.
6. Also follow steps 3-5 for MaintenanceRep.dll

Once you have unblocked the file, you should no longer see the security warning when you go back into file properties and all of the above mentioned errors related to loading repositories should be resolved.

Notes:

• If you have not yet installed BHM v3.2, you can also follow the above steps on the unzipped package prior to installing BHM.
• In some cases, we’ve seen that the “Unblock” option is not there when BHMv3.2.zip was unzipped using a 3rd party tool.  To unzip, right-click on BHMv3.2.zip and choose Extract All.

In BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM) v3.2 we decoupled the Query/Rules and Maintenance repositories from the tool itself.  This was done so we could provide repository updates via Azure without having to release a new version of BHM every time.

BHM v3.2 shipped with the following repositories:

Below is a list of all subsequent repository updates.  This page will continue to be updated as new releases are made.

See here for more information on how to update BHM in your environment with the latest repositories.

Click on the version number for more details on that specific update.

Updates in Query Repository 13.47.0.0:

• Check for BTS2013 CU4, BAP2013 CU3, HIS2013 CU3, Swift MP2015 CU1 & CU2, BTS2013R2 CU2, BTS2010 CU9
• Check for .NET 4 and .NET 4.6
• Change SQL2012 SP rule to check for SP3 instead of SP2
• Change MLLP 64 bits support warning in BTS2013
• List all BAM Activities with their definition XML file and Online Time Window
• Show Critical Warning for BTS2010 being out of mainstream support
• Get all installed programs on each BTS Server
• Fix rule checking SQL 2008 R2 SP3 not raising warning
• Other minor fixes and corrections

Updates in Maintenance Repository 2.4.5941.31641:

• Added new task: View Count of Orphaned DTA Tracking Parts and Fragments
• Added new task: DELETE Orphaned DTA Tracking Parts and Fragment
• Added new task: View Count of MarkLog Table in All DBs
• Added new task: Purge MarkLog Table in All DBs
• Added new task: PURGE FailedTrackingData Table in the BAMPrimaryImport
• Fixed incorrect counts with View Spool Message Count of Instances task
• Other minor fixes and corrections

Hello everyone! Thanks to your continuous feedback and suggestions which helped us shipping another version of BHM with exciting new updates. One of the commonly requested feature from our customers was to add “real-time” monitoring capabilities in BHM in addition to the existing Health Check feature. A monitoring capability that lets you monitor critical components of a BizTalk group like receive locations, send ports, orchestrations, host instances, queues, and BizTalk databases sizes. BHMv4 addresses that feedback and provides a very easy and quick way to enable such monitoring by reusing the health check framework of BHM and its flexible profiles feature. In addition to the new features, BHMv4 will also be compatible with newly released BizTalk Server 2016. You can download BHMv4 from Microsoft Download Center. Please see the included Readme.htm for installation information.

We would love to hear your feedback about this new version, so please reach out to us either via comment section or drop us an email.

Following is the quick peek in to the New Features of BHMv4.

–        Monitoring Profiles with UI based configuration (Old “Monitoring Profile” is now renamed with “Health Check Profile”)

–        Schedule your report collection with a Windows service (Windows Task option is still available)

–        New “Trace Log” node to quickly display the log of an analyze. Build to show insights in report collection failures.

–        Compatible with and Updated for BizTalk Server 2016

–        Better user experience by allowing Queries and Rules lists to be displayed in full screen mode.

–        Improved repositories auto-update feature

–        More robust. Fixed crash issue on MMC termination.

Before we proceed further let’s understand the difference between “Monitoring Profile” and “Health Check Profile” with their use cases.

Prior to BHMv4, we had only one type of profile known as “Monitoring Profile”. With BHMv4 we are renaming it with “Health Check Profile” as we are introducing a new concept for “Monitoring Profile”. The new Monitoring Profile is auto-populated with the common set of custom rules which can be further customized quickly to suite your requirements. You can schedule the analyze of this monitoring profile and send the output to either the event logs or in an email.

Think of Health Check Profile as a comprehensive check-up of your BizTalk Server Group which you would like to perform in larger interval, like every morning or every mid-night, may be weekly. Monitoring Profile on the other hand is set of few very specific checks that you want to auto-mate in regular interval, like every 5 minutes or at a very specific time frame. For e.g. let’s say my partner is supposed to send me the delivery order every-day at 10 AM. And I would like to make sure that my Receive Location is enabled during that time. With the monitoring profile, I can configure BHM to check the status of that Receive Location at 9:55 AM and send me an alert if it is disabled.

Following section will give you complete details about “Monitoring Profile”

Monitoring Profile

Monitoring profile is in fact a BHM profile but configured specifically to execute a short selection of critical BHM queries/rules and custom rules checking the state of given ports, orchestrations, host instances, queues and BizTalk databases sizes, and raise critical warnings detected in a log.

You can create a new Monitoring Profile by right clicking on the BizTalk Health Monitor node and select NewàMonitoring Profile.

Monitoring Profile Configuration

To configure a Monitoring Profile, right click on the newly created Monitoring Profile and select “Monitoring Configuration”

The Options tab of this dialog box allows you to:

–        Enable\Disable the Monitoring Profile

–        Configure the name of Monitoring Profile

–        Schedule\Actions Settings, lets you choose the schedule method, its frequency and types of actions to collect the report

–        Log Settings, lets you configure the logs where you would like to record the warnings.

–        Email settings, lets you configure the emails alerts

Schedule \ Actions settings: Service or Task

A Monitoring profile can be scheduled either via a Windows Service or a Windows Task. The service or task is automatically created by BHM when you validate the Settings dialog box for the first time. Following is the naming convention: The service name is BizTalk Health Monitor:<profile name>

and The Task name is BizTalk Health Monitor{<profile name>}

The service or task will be configured to run under a specific account that you must enter in the Settings dialog box.

Important Note: This account will be used to execute the BHM queries so it must be a member of BizTalk Administrator group and SYSADMIN on the SQL instance hosting the BizTalk databases to analyze

The service or task will execute BHM collector (BHMCollect.exe) based on the frequency you defined in the Settings dialog box. Notice that the service is not doing anything else than spawning periodically the BHM collector. You can at any time disabled or enabled the monitoring profile by selecting the corresponding action in the profile context menu or in the Settings dialog box. Disabling a profile disables in fact the corresponding Windows service or Windows task. Disabled profile will appear in BHM as red and a running one as green:

Note: If you disabled the service or task outside BHM, it will reflect the new state at startup time or on a refresh action.

Generated report by Monitoring Profile

A BHM report will be always generated after the execution of a Monitoring profile (either manually or scheduled) but the corresponding Report node will not contain a Topology node and Performance nodes, as opposed to a Health Check report. It will still contain however the output of the executed queries. A Monitoring profile is not configured to keep an history of generated reports so it will override the existing report; this configuration is done to avoid having a different report generated each time the profile execution is started:

Warnings and Log

By default, both critical and important warnings (red and orange) detected will be raised to the BHM log but you can configure the profile to raise only simple warnings (yellow); or even keep only the critical warnings to be raised. Note that only the critical warnings will be raised as real errors entries in the BHM log.
Emails

You can also decide to send also emails if critical warnings are detected. The email will contain then the list of critical warnings and the list of key indicators of the group health check. Notice that this email send feature was already present in BHM 3.2

BHM Log

A specific BHM log (Event Los) is used by default to log the warnings but you can change it to be the Application one. The warnings are raised under this format:

Each category of critical warnings raised by BHM in the log has a unique event ID based on a range start ID (5000 by default) and a unique id of the warning category. By default, the source name of the event entry will be suffixed by the warning category but it can be ignored.

The source of the entries is BHM Log and is suffixed by the warning category so you can see quickly the type of BHM warnings raised without displaying their details. The text of each warning entry contains the name of the originating profile, its category, caption and value as they would appear classically in the BHM warnings node. These details will help you to configure any existing monitoring tool that you are using like SCOM.

Monitoring Selection

Rest of the “Monitoring Configuration” tabs allow you to select/unselect from the pre-populated list of rules for monitoring. These lists are automatically populated when they are first visible. For Receive Ports, Send Ports and Orchestrations all the items are selected by default to be monitored:

e.g. scenario – Check every 5 minutes and send me an alert when SendPort1 gets disabled.

The Queues and Databases list views allow to select the sizes of BizTalk queues and databases you want to monitor:

e.g. scenario – Check every 5 minutes and send me an alert when suspended queue of my application goes beyond 500 messages.

Monitoring of queues and BizTalk databases size is disabled by default and no thresholds are defined. You can configure them as per your need:

e.g. scenario – Check every 5 minutes and send me an alert when MsgBoxDB size goes beyond 5000 MB.

Each list view has the possibility to sort and filter its items based on different criteria:

Note: You can maximize the Dialog box to display in full screen mode the list views and have a better visibility of the list items.

Monitoring Profile Settings

You can still display the Profile Settings dialog box for a Monitoring profile which is in fact the standard dialog box already present in previous versions of BHM to change the settings of a profile.

In the Profile settings dialog box, you can see in the Rules tab the custom rules mentioned above and even edit the these rules. It is however recommended to use the Monitoring Configuration dialog box to update automatically these rules, based on your selection.

Report generation and Analyze level

You can also access to all the options which were pre-configured for this monitoring profile, like the single overwrite report generated or the list of selected queries:

Note: You can now maximize the Profile Settings Dialog box to display in full screen mode the list views and have a better visibility of the queries and rules list items

Warning: This profile Settings dialog box can be used to modify the Monitoring profile as you want. However, please be aware that it was pre-configured with specific default settings to allow maximum performance and not generate overhead when executed frequently (every few minutes), so be careful with your selection of additional queries to be executed under a Monitoring profile. For a more comprehensive report, we recommend using Health Check Profile.

Trace Log

In previous versions of BHM, you had to use the context menu of a BHM report to check the status of the file produced during the execution of the profile. BHM v4 now generates a Trace Log node for each report which allows to immediately display the status of an analyze:

Report Access Denied errors

If during the execution of a profile some queries generated Access Denied errors, BHM will notify you of the present of these errors in the Analyze log: