Home » Solutions » Microsoft / .NET Performance Management » BizTalk

In today’s highly competitive business environment and economic climate, companies are forced to automate and optimize business processes across applications, departments and between business partners. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and enterprise application integration (EAI) are the two major approaches to accomplish this task. Microsoft BizTalk facilitates both, connecting disparate application components into a robust and integrated business process.

BizTalk provides a robust message infrastructure where an orchestration engine allows you to implement your business processes. However, it also introduces quite a level of complexity, which results in several points where performance of the overall message processing can be negatively impacted. Thus, to ensure the success of the business processes BizTalk automates, it is essential to analyze BizTalk performance many different ways during development, test and production. Even during 24x7 BizTalk production operations, dynaTrace not just monitors business transactions, but also provides deep problem diagnostics down to codel-level in real-time and offline.

Performance Monitoring of BizTalk Components

Monitoring specific BizTalk metrics provides you with health information from the BizTalk server itself. Hence, this is a simple way to quickly understand if everything is OK or not. For instance, using dynaTrace you can monitor:

• Host Throttling Performance Counters to get insights into message throughput and high-water marks of the Orchestration Engine, the Message Engine and the Message Box
• Connectivity of BizTalk Adapters (e.g. for http, SOAP, SharePoint Services, SQL Server, etc.) and Orchestrations (e.g. to the Message Box or 3rd party Web services) databases to discover configuration problems
• BizTalk resource utilization such as CPU, memory, I/O, handle and thread count to diagnose a problem’s root cause in the underlying system configuration

Performance Management of custom .NET code activities

dynaTrace’s PurePath transacation tracing technology enables you to analyze the performance of your custom .NET code inside your Adapters, Pipelines and Orchestration in context the busienss transaction they execute. This way you can easily:

• Diagnose the root cause of custom .NET code activities down to the offending line of code, such as an incorrect mapping, poor performance orchestration, or inefficient database access
• Detect and diagnose erroneous message mappings such as incorrect data processing inside XSLT transformations
• Understand which business transactions are affected by certain problems, allowing you to prioritize root cause analysis activities
• Ensure that your BizTalk powered business transactions will conform their individual SLAs