Disks

BizTalk Server Disk Monitoring

Your BizTalk may be utilizing its local disks for a variety of reasons. To prevent running out of disk space, it is generally a good practice to monitor those disks. You can set up disk monitoring of the BizTalk server(s) and allow alarms to generate alerts when a particular threshold value has been exceeded.

For instance, your disk size is 100GB and you want to be notified when the disk size goes below 50GB. In such scenarios, you can set up a warning and an alert to be aware of the status of the disks. In addition, you can check the status of the disks without having to actually see the monitoring section by seeing the visual cue next to the component names (in Green/Red color).

Setting up Disk monitoring

1. Log in to the BizTalk360 application.
2. Click 'Monitoring' in the navigation panel.
3. Click the expand button against the 'Manage Mapping' tab and select 'BizTalk Servers.' 
4. Select the BizTalk server from the drop-down for which you want to set up disk space monitoring.
5. Select the Alarm name (see Manage Alarms) from the drop-down for which you would like to associate the alerts.
6. Click the 'Enable Monitoring' button to set up monitoring for the disks.  By default, the warning threshold limit is set to less than 40% and the error is set to less than 20%. you can customize your alert to trigger a notification when the available disk space goes below a certain percentage (say 10% or 20%). 
7. Click 'Save' to save the disk monitoring information.
8. At any point, to stop monitoring, click the 'Disable Monitoring' button.

In the above video, it is shown that the BizTalk server BTS1 needs to be monitored for available disk space based on the below threshold conditions. 

• A Warning notification should be received in case available Disk space on C: goes below 40% and available Disk space on G: goes below 40% and available Disk space on G: goes below 10% 
• An Error notification should be received in case available Disk space on C: goes below 20% and available Disk space on D: goes below 20% and available Disk space on G: goes below 5% 

Shared Disk Monitoring 

In a clustered BizTalk Server environment, disk usage is a critical aspect for ensuring high availability and performance. In such environments, multiple BizTalk Server nodes share access to the same storage resources. Each resource within the environment is owned by a single node at any given time. If a node fails, an RPC server unavailable exception will be thrown and the active biztalk server's disks can be monitored.

Dashboard and Notifications

Once the BizTalk server disks are mapped for monitoring, the health status of the disks will be shown in dashboard in a graphical tree view.  If the threshold values configured for disks mapped are violated, it will be listed in the errors and warnings along with the associated alarms. You can also navigate to the respective server's disks on clicking them.

In order to receive email notifications from BizTalk360 on the threshold violation alerts, you need to configure the SMTP settings under BizTalk360 Settings. Follow the steps in this article to be able to configure the SMTP settings in BizTalk360. You will receive an email notification with the exact details of the status of the BizTalk server disks.