Receive Locations

In this section, we will see how to set up monitoring for BizTalk Receive Locations. As Receive Locations are used for receiving messages from external systems, it is important to make sure the Receive Locations are healthy and running in the expected state to avoid interruptions of the business process.

BizTalk360 assists administrators by monitoring the Receive Locations against a predefined status. For instance, you want to monitor the Receive Locations of an application and want to be alerted when the status becomes Disabled. You can easily configure this, by setting the Expected State of the Receive Location to be 'Enabled'. By doing this, BizTalk360 will trigger an alert as soon as the Receive Location status becomes Disabled.

An important feature of BizTalk360 monitoring is, that it allows you to set up monitoring for any desired state for your Receive Locations, so not necessarily just a healthy running (Enabled) state. When you are configuring monitoring for Receive Locations, you can select one of the Expected States from the drop-down. The meaning of the states are:

• Enabled – The Receive Location is expected to be in an Enabled state.
• Disabled – The Receive Location is expected to be in the Disabled state.
• Do not monitor – Selecting this option will disable monitoring for the selected Receive Location
• Unmapped - This means that no monitoring has yet been set up for the selected Receive Location

Setting up Alerts for Receive Locations

You can execute the following steps to set up an alert for the receive locations:

1. Log in to the BizTalk360 application.
2. Navigate to Monitoring -> Manage Mapping -> Applications in the selected environment.
3. Select the Application for which you want to set up Receive Location monitoring.
4. Choose the Alarm (refer Manage Alarms) from the drop-down for which you would like to associate the alerts. 
5. Click the Receive Locations tab , all the available Receive locations under the application will be listed.
6. Enable the check box against the Receive Locations you want to monitor.
7. Set the value of the 'Expected State' by selecting the value from the drop-down. For instance, if you want to make sure the Receive Location(s) is/are in the Enabled state, set up the value from the drop-down list to 'Enabled'. Once set, if the Receive Location is not in the enabled state, BizTalk360 will send notifications.
8. If the current state of the mapped artifacts matches the expected state, the monitor status will be set as Healthy. If there is a contradiction between the expected and current states, the monitor status will be set as Critical. If the mapped artifacts are in a critical state, they will be shown in the monitoring dashboard, group dashboard and listed in the errors and warnings page. Additionally, notifications will be sent to the users regarding the violation of the artifacts.

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 Receive Location(s) of an application and additionally set up the auto correct functionality for the Expected State of the artifact (which should be "Enabled").

Whenever the receive location goes down/gets disabled, 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 artifact will come back to the Expected State within the next monitoring service cycle (60 seconds).

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

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

From the Inventory_alarm, all the selected Receive Locations of the Application-MSMQ need to be monitored. The current state is Disabled, but the Expected state is Enabled. Also, Auto Correct needs to be Enabled.

When a Receive Location goes down,

Attempt 1 - Auto correct will attempt to bring the Receive Location to the expected state for the first time during the monitoring cycle (Max Retry: 5, Attempt Count: 1). Let's assume the attempt was unsuccessful. You will receive an Auto Correction Alert email with the information. At this point, the Monitoring Dashboard will display the state of the artifact as Critical (2). When you click on the count, you will notice the auto correction steps that have been performed on the artifact.
Attempt 2 - Auto correct will attempt a retry for the second time during the next monitoring cycle (Max Retry: 5, Attempt Count: 2). Let's again assume the attempt was unsuccessful. You will receive the second auto correction email with the information.
Attempt 3 - Auto correct will attempt a retry for the third time during the next monitoring cycle (Max Retry: 5, Attempt Count: 3). Let's assume this attempt was successful. You will receive the third auto correction email with the information. Within the next few seconds, the Monitoring Dashboard will display the state of the artifact as healthy. Lastly, the attempt count will reset to 0 (Max Retry: 5, Attempt Count: 0)

Orphaned Receive Locations

When the mapped receive location was deleted from the BizTalk admin console or renamed, then that artifact is marked as orphaned. The monitor state of these orphaned artifacts is set as Warning .These orphaned artifacts can be removed right from the user interface by clicking the 'Remove Orphaned' button.