EDI

In this section, the following is discussed:

• What's the purpose of EDI Data Monitoring
• Setting up an EDI Data Monitor

What's the purpose of EDI Data Monitoring

When it comes to EDI transactions through the system, administrators are forced to keep a watch on the status of interchange acknowledgments, batch statuses, AS2/MDN statuses, and other such details associated with the transactions. To achieve this, administrators must query the status of each transaction manually in the BizTalk Server Administration Console. This is a monotonous task for the administrator and BizTalk360 helps them to reduce the time spent from performing these monotonous tasks by offering the EDI Data Monitoring capabilities within the UI.

The administrators can set up a Data Monitor as "Warn me when there are > 15 Interchange/ACK Status and send an error notification when Interchange/ACK status > 20 within an hour during the business day". In this case, the data monitor will execute every hour from 9 AM to 6 PM to check for the number of Interchange/ACK status messages during the hour and throw the error/warning notifications to the administrators through the notification channels. This reduces the effort of the administrator to manually check for the status of EDI reports on a regular basis.

Setting up an EDI Data Monitor

Follow the steps as shown below to create an EDI Data Monitoring alarm:

• In case you did not do it earlier, follow the steps as mentioned in this section to create a Data Monitoring alarm
• Select the 'Use this alarm for Data Monitor Alerts' check box to map the current alarm to Data Monitors. Only when this option is selected, the 'Notify on Success as well' check box gets activated.
• The 'Notify on Success as well' check box is optional for Data Monitoring, while the Use this alarm for Data Monitor Alerts option is mandatory
• Click OK to save the alarm information

1. Choose Alarm - As mentioned above, the first step to set up EDI data monitoring is to create an alarm. Once you have created the alarm, the alarm name will be displayed in the drop-down. Select the alarm that should be used for EDI data monitoring purposes
2. Schedule Name (Friendly Monitor Name) - A meaningful name for the EDI Data Monitor. Say, as per your requirement you want to get notified with a warning message when the number of Interchange/ACK status messages is > 15 and throw an error notification when the number of interchange/ACK status messages is > 20. The monitor name can be set as "Interchange/ACK status > 15 - trigger a warning; Interchange/ACK status > 20 - trigger an error message"
3. Query Type - This section is very similar to the Electronic Data Interchange section in BizTalk360. Select the type of query for which you want to run the data monitor. As per the above requirement, since we are looking for Interchange/ACK status reports, select 'Interchange/ACK Status' from the drop-down
4. Add a filter - To filter the query results based on different parameters (control ID, direction, receiver party, sender party, status)
5. Warning Threshold - Select the value from the drop-down on when you want to be notified when there is a warning. The first drop down is to select the Operator (> or =) and the second operator is to select the warning value. For e.g., When the number of status messages is> 15, throw a warning
6. Error Threshold - Select the value from the drop-down on when you want to be notified when there is an error. The first drop down is to select the Operator (> or =) and the second operator is to select the warning value. For e.g., When a number of status messages are > 20, throw an error
7. How often you want to monitor - Select the duration of how often you want to monitor for EDI status reports. The options are - Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. Depending on the selection, you can add further filter criteria on how often you want to monitor:

• Daily - will set up the data monitor to execute everyday
• Weekly - The data monitor will execute on the selected days of the week (Every Day, Monday-Friday, or the selected day of choice). To add a single day of the week, click the control and select the day of your choice
• Monthly - The data monitor will execute on the selected day of the month. To add a specific day of the month, enter the date in the space provided or select the date from the drop-down If a particular day is not present in the month (say, 29th Feb), then the system will skip that month and generate the results on the specified day in the next month

8. When during the day - Select the time when the data monitor must execute on a particular day during business hours. You can customize your business hours by selecting the values from the Business Day Start and Business Day End options By default, the business day start time is 9 AM and business day end time is 5 PM. Depending on the business hour selection, the following options are available when you want the data monitor to execute on a particular day.
9. At what time - Select the time when the data monitor should execute on a particular day. The options are - At the end of the business day and at a set frequency (every 1 hour or 15 minutes)

• At the end of the business day - If this option is chosen, the data monitor will execute depending on the value chosen in the Business Day End field. For e.g, if the business end time specified is 5 PM (default value), the data monitor will execute exactly at 5 PM.
• Monitor every X minutes/hours - You can define specific intervals during the business hours when the data monitor should execute. The options available are Minutes and Hours
  • Minutes - Select the number of minutes after which the data monitor should execute. E.g., 30 minutes means the data monitor will execute once in every 30 minutes
• Hours - Select the number of hours after which the data monitor should execute during the business hours. E.g., 2 hours means the data monitor will execute once in 2 hours between 9 AM and 5 PM The minimum time interval supported is 1 hour.

10. End Date - You can define a date range (from date and to date) when you want the data monitor to execute. You can set up a data monitor to start, say, on a Monday and end on the next Tuesday. In addition to this, you can set up the other settings mentioned above in the previous steps. This means the data monitor will only start to run next Monday and will not execute after Tuesday By default, the Advanced section will be in a Collapsed state. Click the '>' button to expand the Advanced section and make the settings.
11. How do you want to check

• Based on only Query result count (no date/time filter) - Selecting this option will execute the query based on the setting for trigger time (Defined under 'At what time' as explained above in step 10). Say, the monitor at set frequency is set to every 15 minutes, the query execution will happen once in every 15 minutes till the specified end time
• Based on Query result with date/time range - Selecting this option will activate the "Choose date/time column" drop down from where the appropriate option can be selected (Interchange Time). When selected, the query will be constructed with the from/to date time filter based on the selected date/time column, and execute the query with the time range. Say, for instance, if the data monitor is scheduled to execute every hour from 9 AM to 6 PM, and currently, the time is 11:59 AM, during the next run of the data monitor at 12 PM, it will look for the query results between 11:01 AM and 11:59 AM and generate the results

12. Summary - The summary information will automatically be populated based on the information selected in the previous columns
13. Save - Once all the values are selected in the previous steps, click Save to save the settings.
14. Cancel - Click Cancel to discard the changes. When the close button is clicked, the system will display a confirmation message as "There are unsaved changes, do you still want to close?". Click Yes to close the Data Monitoring creation window. Click No to remain on the same page.