Monitoring Applications: Health and Activity Tracking

BizTalk Server 2004 applications do many things: send and receive messages, process messages within orchestrations, communicate with various applications through different protocols, and more. It is essential to keep track of what is going on, especially when failures occur. To do this, you need a way to look into running applications and to monitor the system activity. This exactly describes the services provided by the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) component of BizTalk Server 2004.

The HAT tool provides graphical access to detailed information, including when an orchestration starts and ends, when each shape within it is executed, when each of its messages is sent and received, what the messages contain, and much more. You can set breakpoints, enabling you to stop the orchestration and examine it at predetermined places.

You can also use the HAT tool to examine archived data, looking for patterns and trends in the execution of a business process. This information is useful for debugging, answering business questions (such as verifying that a message really was sent to a customer), and keeping ongoing statistics that can be used to improve performance.

See Also

Creating Scalable Configurations

Managing Applications