NT Services

Monitoring the NT Services in BizTalk Server

Windows NT services can automatically get started when the system boots up, while a few of them require manual intervention to get them started. As important as the services are to allow the system to perform its regular actions, it is important to monitor their status on a periodic basis. 

For instance, let us consider the IIS Admin Service. The IIS Admin service hosts the IIS configuration, and it is responsible to monitor the SMTP and FTP connections to your server. This NT service needs to be started when the server boots up. Accidentally, if this service does not start, you will be unable to configure SMTP or FTP and, in turn, any other NT services that depend on it will fail to start. Therefore, you need to set up monitoring for this NT Service, to send you an alert when the status is 'Stopped'. It is a general best practice to monitor NT Services that are important for BizTalk like the Enterprise Single Sign-On, BAM Alerts, or the World Wide Web Publishing Service to be running and monitor some other services to be stopped so that resources on the Servers are not being overutilized.

You can monitor the NT services for two different states - Running and Stopped. A Running state indicates that the NT service has been started and is currently performing the respective operations. A Stopped state means that the NT service is not running and needs manual intervention to be started. You can set up the alerts for the different states to be alerted when there is a violation in these states.

Setting up monitoring for NT Services

• Navigate to Monitoring ->Manage Mapping -> BizTalk Servers 
• Select the BizTalk server from the drop-down for which you want to set up the monitoring on NT services.
• Select the Alarm (See Manage Alarms) from the drop-down for which you would like to associate the alerts.
• Choose the NT Services that you wish to monitor and receive the alerts.
• Set the value of Expected State by selecting from the value from the drop-down. For instance, if the current state of the NT Services is Running and you want to be alerted when it is stopped, you need to set the value in the drop-down to Running. 
• You can also monitor the startup type and log on as an account for the above monitoring NT Services by simply clicking on the NT Service 
  • Set the expected state for Startup type as Auto / Manual, Disabled, Do Not Monitor, Automatic (Delayed/Triggered start)
  • Set the expected logon as Local user, Domain user, Local Service, NT Service account, etc 
• View the detailed monitoring result of the above-mapped state alert, logon alert Start up type alert by clicking on the eye icon in the respective NT Services.

Monitored Results of NT Service will look like below,

You can stop monitoring by setting the expected state as 'DoNotMonitor'.

Monitoring Clustered NT Services

Consider a scenario where you have a clustered BizTalk environment, in which your Enterprise Single sign-on service is configured as Generic Type, i.e. the SSO service is clustered, and you want to ensure that the SSO service should up and running in the clustered nodes. These services will probably reside on several servers, which makes it rather time-consuming to constantly be aware of the current status of the Windows Services. Probably, when monitoring manually, you will end up with checking the state only once or twice per day and maybe even forgetting it. 

While monitoring the BizTalk clustered NT services, the system identifies the active node within the cluster. The monitoring activities happen only based on the Active Node. For instance, when users set the expected state of "Service 1" to "Running," the system promptly checks whether "Service 1" is currently operational on the active node. If it is running, the monitoring status is marked as "Healthy." However, if "Service 1" is found to be stopped on the active node, the status is immediately changed to "Critical." Furthermore, if "Service 1" is not available on the active node, the monitoring status is set to "Orphaned." 

Auto Correct Functionality

With the Auto Correct functionality, administrators can set up monitoring on any "State-based" artifact and let the monitoring service try to automatically recover the artifact any time when there is a mismatch between the "Expected State" and the "Current State". For instance, administrators can set up monitoring on the NT service(s) and additionally set up the auto correct functionality for the Expected State of the artifact (which should be "Running").

Whenever the NT services go down/gets stopped, there will be a mismatch in the state and the Auto Correct will try to bring the artifact back to the expected state. If the operation is successful, the services will come back to the Expected State within the next monitoring service cycle (60 seconds).

Assuming you are still on the NT services screen, follow the below steps to setup Auto Correct for NT services:

1. Select the check box of the NT service(s) for which you want to set up Auto Correct.
2. Select the Auto Correct drop-down and select 'Running'.
3. Auto Correct will be enabled for the NT service(s) with the default values for Max Retry as 5 and Retry Count as 0.

Dashboard and Notifications 

Once the BizTalk server NT Services are mapped for monitoring, the health status of the NT services will be shown in dashboard in a graphical tree view.  If the expected state and current state are in contradiction, then it is considered as a violation. It will be listed in the errors and warnings along with the associated alarms. You can also navigate to the respective NT services on clicking them.

In order to receive email notifications from BizTalk360 on the 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 NT services.