I’m going to start a series of articles about the best technologies I’m going to use in my job and I would like to do a technical review across the board.
As I said before, in this last period I have to use a lot of different interesting technologies, this because the integration world is growing in very fast way and the customers requirements are more specified every day more, more performances, more easy operation management, more monitoring and control in the business solutions.
I like to use and play with products and technologies when they are well done and powerful, for example I was really impressed by the Microsoft Event Hub, I played with him in these last days, one million message in just one second and in reliable way, this is awesome, I will write something about that in next posts, but I want to back to BizTalk360.
A customer asked me about a solution to manage his BizTalk infrastructure, so I decided to install BizTalk360 to do a demo to him.
I remember the first BizTalk360 demo that I saw in Seattle, a couple of years ago, the product was in Silverlight, with some interesting features, but I couldn’t image so many changes and features in just two years, I have only one word, impressive.
The installation is very fast and simple, I don’t have many things to write about the instalation, next next next next ….. done.
After the installation, the portal will be open, and all features are already running and configured, the number of features is impressive and most of them are really useful, this means that the product is created by persons that working with Microsoft BizTalk Server in real , every day.
Impossible to describe all the features in one post, but I can speak about my impression and about my thoughts.
Many feature are useful to solve any kind of problem that you can have with a BizTalk infrastructure, but not only for that, I’m going to use BizTalk360 during the development to improve the productivity.
Very well done, is the navigation inside the product, I mean that you start to use a feature and you will go to use other features just navigating inside the artifacts.
The world of the integration lives on the dependencies between on artifacts and services, and a intelligent navigation is the best strategy to be fast to understand possible problems or to manage the artifacts in fast way.
The menu on the left follows the user proposing a completed vision every moment.
The monitoring and notification is really detailed and this is one of the most important aspect in a BizTalk solution, you can set alarms for a lot of different situations and areas.
Another important thing is that you can combine this technology areas, for example BizTalk + Event Viewer + Sql Server, to create a lot of very powerful monitoring strategies.
The Graphical Flow is amazing, I tried to image about solving any kind of usual problem about tracking and I realized that with this feature you can.
I want to propose a classic situation and I want to try to image how to solve this without this feature in so easy way, below the sample:
You know you have a big problem with a send pipeline, this is a runtime error, the problem is that you need to understand who is using this pipeline.
This is important, because the error is about some error inside the message and the data are created by some orchestrations, so i need to construct the message flow to understand where I need to operate.
Unfortunately in 98% of the situations we don’t have any kind of good documentation, we have to be honest about that.
The step to accomplish this is very well done, after open Graphical Flow, you make a query with any kind of criterias you want and look for the pipeline.
Click on the pipeline and, very important thing, you can navigate forward or backward, in this case you will go to reconstruct all the messaging flow, in this case was a send pipeline and you can create multiple view and navigate in deep as you want.
The product covers all the most important aspects about a BizTalk solution, some of the feature are really specialized for advanced troubleshooting as the Throttling Analyzer and Advance Event Viewer.
The Disaster and Recovering is the most crucial part in a BizTalk environment, BizTalk depends in all on Sql Server.
BizTalk uses a lot of different databases, Message Box for the messaging transaction and many other to cover a lot of different aspects, Administion, SSO, BAM, BRE and so on.
The feature Backup-DR Monitor is very well done, you can manage all of these aspects in very easy way.
There are so many features, I think that the best way to understand the product is to go in the BizTalk360 site (http://www.biztalk360.com), the site is really full of documentation, just reading the product tour, you will be able to use the product.
You can download the evaluation version and install it in very easy and fast way, I’m sure that I will write more about this product, I really love to play with products well done and now I start to understand why BizTalk360 has more than 200 customers in the world.
