How BizTalk360 Advisor recommends utilizing the features to full extend?

Key Takeaways of the Blog

• Why did we build the BizTalk360 Advisor in BizTalk360?
• The idea behind the BizTalk360 Advisor
• Feature Insights about feature usage telemetric data.
• How users can generate the BizTalk360 Advisor report.
• Recommendation to use the less or not utilized features.
• Return on Investment (ROI).
• How the BizTalk360 Advisor data helps to improve the BizTalk360 Application.

Why did we build the Advisor in BizTalk360?

BizTalk360 is a one-stop solution to effectively manage, monitor, and analyze the BizTalk environment. BizTalk360 has 100+ features with 60+ releases of the product. More than 600 enterprises use BizTalk360 to manage their BizTalk Environments. Each organization has a different BizTalk Server Architecture to meet the business goals, however

Most organizations use core BizTalk Server components such as

• BizTalk Applications
• Message Boxes
• Host Instances
• Adapters

Additionally, they may incorporate more features like:

• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
• BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM).
• Azure Services or External Services.

BizTalk360 offers rich features to monitor these BizTalk Components, administer them, and provide insights through Analytics.

However, given the extensive range of features, it’s complex for business users to use all 100+ features offered by BizTalk360. To address this gap, the BizTalk360 Advisor report is introduced in the latest versions of BizTalk360(v10.7 and v10.8). The BizTalk360 Monitoring Service gathers BizTalk360 features usage statistical and configuration data in the BizTalk environment. The usage pattern helps users to understand the features that are underutilized or not used at all in BizTalk360.

The idea behind the BizTalk360 Advisor Feature

A sub-service within the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service, known as “Feature Usage”, handles gathering usage data. This sub-service is designed to capture telemetry information, such as the frequency of feature usage and any configurations made within the Administration, Monitoring, Mapping, and Analytics modules.

BizTalk360 Administrators can enable this feature by navigating to General Settings–> Feature Usage–> Configuration. Once enabled, the sub-service will transmit the collected information at regular intervals every seven days.

The feature usage service commonly collects the following information:

• The BizTalk Group architecture information like the number of BizTalk Servers, SQL Servers, Host Instances, and BizTalk Applications.
• The above-mentioned information will decide how monitoring configurations are handled in the Manage Mapping section.

BizTalk360 fetches configuration details and the number of visits for every feature in BizTalk360 weekly.

There are two options available for transmitting the gathered telemetry data to the customer-centric BizTalk360 Advisor portal.

Without verification: In this option, the Advisor sub-service will automatically send the telemetry data to the BizTalk360 Advisor portal via BizTalk360 APIs.

With verification: When this option is chosen, “Verify collected feature usage details” before pushing the data. Users can verify the collected usage data before publishing it to BizTalk360-centric databases in Azure via external API hosted or email in case no internet connection is available from the BizTalk360 Server.

Insights about feature usage telemetric data

The BizTalk360 feature usage service collects the metrics about several features from the BizTalk360 Instance. The usage data is classified into two different reports, which are a General Configuration and BizTalk Environment Artifacts report and a BizTalk360 feature configuration report.

Let’s have a look at both reports:

1. General Usage Report (BizTalk360)

This holds details about the general BizTalk360 configurations:

• General Settings – Global system configurations and licensing details.
• BizTalk360 Health – BizTalk360 Service health status, Purging details and Database health status.
• Notifications – Configured notification channels and email template details.
• Team Management – BizTalk360 User lists and User profile role-based access. This allows the BizTalk360 Administrator to fine-grain the user access policies based on usage.
• Analytics Configuration like APM (Application Performance Monitoring) Integration.

2. BizTalk Environment usage report

The BizTalk Environment usage report consists of the usage of BizTalk360 Administration, Monitoring mapping, and Analytics features.

Administration

These data points help to analyze the Administration activities of often-accessed features:

• BizTalk Services: BizTalk Applications and its Artifacts, Message Box Queries, Tracking Queries, Business Rules Engine, ESB and EDI are grouped under one place.
• Advanced Services: In this section, out-of-box features are clubbed together, such as Secure SQL Queries, Advanced Event Viewer, and Tracking Manager. These features’ usage shows how the users adopted the BizTalk360 features to value out of investment.
• Azure Services: Insights about Azure offerings features in the Administration of Logic Apps, Integration Accounts, Service Bus Queues and Topics and subscriptions.
• Manage Infrastructure: This section has enriched functionalities compared to BizTalk Admin Console, like BizTalk Server with statistics about CPU and memory usage, Host Instances operations with governance & audit, Back-Up & Disaster Recovery visualization, and BizTalk group architecture in Topology.

Monitoring

The BizTalk360 Monitoring service gathers the Alarm mapping configuration with different metrics like the number of artifacts and the environment artifacts:

• BizTalk Application Artifacts mapping with Auto-correct action.
• Environment level monitoring configuration like Host Instances, Host Throttling, BizTalk Health Monitor, EDI, Database Query, and Database Size.
• BizTalk and SQL Server Resources Server Availability.
• SQL Server Instance’s SQL Jobs monitoring configuration of state and Last Run status.
• Queues and File location endpoints.
• In Azure Services Monitoring covers Logic Apps, Services Bus Queues, and Topics health with expected state and derived with the message processing metrics.

Fetching information off the available artifacts in the BizTalk environment can help to figure out the usage of monitoring capabilities.

Analytics

The BizTalk360 Analytics Dashboard is key to presenting the BizTalk message processing performance and Infrastructure performance tracking in a graphical view. The Host Throttling Analyzer is a vital feature to visualize the insights about the throttling conditions in BizTalk Hosts.

These feature usage metrics about the Performance and Tracking data collection, Dashboards,and Reporting schedule will help the administrator to keep track of the performance of message processing and infrastructure health.

Environment Configuration

Usage of environment-level Administrative Tasks are:

• Automated Tasks
• Scheduled Maintenance
• BizTalk360 logs

Historical Reports of BizTalk360 Advisor

In the report section of BizTalk360 Advisor, users can access the latest and historical usage reports.

Considering the users opt in for the automation of feature usage collection, they can verify the usage data that has been collected from the BizTalk360 Monitoring service in a report view.

When the user chooses the data verification option, they can view the report before pushing the data to the BizTalk360 feature usage collection. Additionally, users can download the report, which is available on the history page.

The BizTalk Advisor history report will be available based on the purge duration. The default duration is set to 6 months.

Recommendations based on configuration and usage

The data collected by the BizTalk360 Advisor benefits both the users and the BizTalk360 application, by which recommendations are provided to the BizTalk and BizTalk360 Administrators.

1. Environment Health

BizTalk Server

The usage data helps to find the actionable items about the BizTalk Environment Infrastructure, the BizTalk Databases and the message processing flow.

BizTalk360

In addition to that, the BizTalk360 Advisor encompasses health recommendations for BizTalk360 Services and SQL Server Instances.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Use the features available in Platinum Tier

Users who have obtained the BizTalk360 top (Platinum) license tier benefit from a rich set of features, including EDI, SFTP monitoring, Analytics, Automated Tasks, Throttling Analyzer and SQL Server Monitoring (8 Servers). To maximize the investment in BizTalk360, the organization that brought the top tier can use many applicable features as possible.

For Instance, if performance data collection is not turned on, it means the feature usage recommendation report will recommend enabling the performance data collection and configuring the reporting schedule. That will help the operational or business units to get more insights about BizTalk Messaging performances and Infrastructure health.

Throttling Analyzer

Understanding BizTalk Server Host Throttling is difficult, even for well-experienced BizTalk experts. Finding the exact bottleneck that causes a BizTalk Host to throttle is a challenge. The Throttling Analyzer helps BizTalk Administrators to visualize the various performance counters in near real time.

The BizTalk360 Advisor’s recommendations are classified into three categories based on the importance of recommendations to business and environmental health.

• Highly Recommended: These recommendations are important to keep the BizTalk environment and smooth processing of business transactions. BizTalk Administrators can take the right actions which align with organizational policies and processes.
• Suggested: The action points that fall under this category help to avoid unexpected behavior in the BizTalk environment.
• Consideration: The organization can consider these action points in future BizTalk Application deployment, Infrastructure maintenance scenarios and BizTalk360 feature usage.

This customer engagement process helps to understand the return on investment of the BizTalk360 application!

How the BizTalk360 Advisor helps to improve the BizTalk360 Application?

Using the collected statistical data, the product team will analyze the most used features of the customers. Prioritize the feature requests based on the feature usage and number of visits weightage.

Feature usage patterns will give insights into the holistic views of the most used features in the BizTalk360 application. These recommendations give BizTalk360 users the opportunity to maximize the use of the application’s features.

Conclusion

In the context of BizTalk360 Advisor’s usage, statistical information helps the users with recommendations and the application team to focus on the features that are most widely used.

Get benefits using the BizTalk360 Advisor and its recommendations. Reach out to the BizTalk360 team if you need any further clarification.

Reach out to us for a BizTalk360 demo or a free trial to try out the product.