High Availability

The BizTalk360 Monitoring Service plays a key role as it is responsible to fetch the status of artefacts from the BizTalk Server Group. When the monitoring service accidentally stops running, you will not receive any notifications about threshold violations in the environment, etc.. To prevent this problem, you could cluster the Monitoring Service using the Windows Failover clustering mechanism. However, there may be situations when the BizTalk environment does not have a failover clustering mechanism. To solve this problem and to make the BizTalk360 Monitoring Service more robust, BizTalk360 offers out of the box High Availability.

Achieving High Availability

To achieve High Availability (HA), you need to install the BizTalk360 monitoring service on multiple servers and point them to the same BizTalk configuration database. The monitoring service on each BizTalk360 server will do regular health checks to make sure at least one of them is active. Only the active server will trigger alerts and notifications for the health of the artefacts at periodic intervals. BizTalk360 considers one of the servers to be the primary server, while it treats the other to be secondary.

UI Improvements to activate the monitoring service

You can manually change a passive server to the active state by selecting it and clicking on the Activate button. Instantly, the passive server becomes active and switches to be the primary server.

Similarly when one of the BizTalk server fails, the BizTalk360 monitoring service will realize that one of the instance has failed and immediately the second node (server) takes over the role of primary. You can have preconfigured alerts for this scenario so that you will get a notification when either of the servers have an unexpected failure. When the stopped server/service comes back online after a period of time, they will automatically be set to the passive state as the other server is currently the active one.

Viewing High Availability status

• Log in to the BizTalk360 application
• Click 'Settings' (gear icon) located at the top of the page
• Click 'BizTalk360 Health' in the Menu panel on the left side of the screen
• Click High Availability Status

If your environment has multiple registered servers, you will notice that one server is Active (primary) and the other one(s) are secondary

• Active - Selecting and clicking the Active button will make the selected server as active (primary) and switch the remaining ones to secondary
• Last Live Time - Indicates the last recent time till when the servers were active and running. When a server accidentally stops running, the last live time will help you with the time to look into the event logs to ascertain the cause of failure