BizTalk Health Monitor v3.1 released!

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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 image
  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. image
  5. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC. image

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 https://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

 

Thanks,

BHMTeam