BizTalk 360 Message Flow

I installed the latest latest version of BizTalk 360 (www.BizTalk360.com) , I already knew all the work arounds to make it work, so this was up and running quicker this time. Refer to my other post: Review/summary Biztalk360

I was intrested in the message flow, which leverages the tracking database, of which sad old HAT was used to display this detail, and peices the pircutre based on tracked events, back together.  I congraulate the BizTalk 360 team for being able to hook into the queries of the DTA databse that that old HAT thing does when you click message flow on a tracked message.

There is an easier way of doing this, but lets go with this first of all, as this is what happened to my message.

I liked this that I decided a post about it was worth the effort, given that much of what BizTalk 360 can't track is shown here, in our solutions 90% of the messages go to and from the Bus, or message box, we leverage direct bound ports, that communicate with various external systems, that form part of a shared network of systems we can leverage the services of via the ESB. With out using the ESB framework, it becomes much simpler to implement.

However here is what it gives me, which is nice, I have had to remove any company details and information, hence the black blobs, but you can see the process is shown, and whilst it took time, and looks a bit messy, you can move things around, but you can see what went down graphically, its pretty to the eye.

Whats important here is every link out of an orchestration and into another is not monitored, what detail that line contains, and what happened inside that orchestration is also not monitored and tracked in BizTalk 360, with sufficent detail, not even what went down each line, what was the message and what was the critical business detail here.

For my implementation of this process and all behind this process flow, I have BAM hooked in, it follows the whole process, leaps and jumps to and from different steps, and different orchestrations, flowing the logic, and pulling key data out. More importantly it knows if something didn't work, as we don't just fail and suspend, we handle and report, implement retry logic and re-submision abilities. Based on what BAM is telling us, the reporting we get is amazing, its not a pretty picture, but the reporting guys do make it look decent in reporting services.

Anyway have a look below, the picture is very nice, but just remember what is missing from the picture, is everything you need to see, and the picture falls into the pretty photos part, it is a great effort to get the picture, but there is more to BizTalk than a pretty Picture. Be sure to check my other post on this topic.