Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

11.10. BizTalk Monitoring

As has been stated repeatedly throughout this book, applications built using BizTalk are typically part of the lifeblood of an organization. For example, if you work for a bank that is using BizTalk to process all payments received from and sent to other financial institutions, it is essential that this system stay up. If it does not, the consequences can be severe both personally to the administrator of the system who may be "asked" to leave and to the organization as a whole, which could face regulatory fines, bad publicity, and the like.

Remember that the availability of your BizTalk application depends on a number of components, including ESSO, SQL Server, the underlying OS, and usually many more. Therefore, it is essential that you reduce the difficulty associated with monitoring a system and do your utmost to avoid the avoidable wherever possible.

The goal of monitoring is to minimize the direct and indirect costs (losses through downtime, etc.) associated with operations and to simplify the identification and root-cause resolution of issues. Monitoring should also provide administrators with enough information to deal with problems proactively (before they affect the level of service that the business receives). This section will discuss the monitoring product that Microsoft provides and how to configure it to monitor BizTalk and its dependant components.

11.10.1. Microsoft Operations Manager

Many products are available that allow you to monitor ...