NT Services

In this section, we will see how to set up monitoring of NT Services in a Clustered and  Non- Clustered server using BizTalk360.

Monitoring the NT Services in Non-Clustered Server

The NT services will automatically get started when the system boots up, while a few of them require manual intervention to get them started. As important 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 up, 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 on these states. 

Monitoring the NT Services for Clustered SQL Server

Monitoring the Clustered SQL server is bit differ from monitoring a non clustered server. To get monitor the NT services for a clustered server, add the Network server name of the Clustered SQL servers for monitoring instead of adding the Physical server name. The Network server will run under the active server from the clustered nodes. Once it has been added for monitoring, BizTalk360 will automatically pick the state of the SQL Server (Clustered/Non-Clustered) and active node of the server, same will be displayed in the Currently Monitoring Active Node. In case of any failover, the Network Server will automatically switch to the active node (Fail over Node).  Then the configured NT services also will switch to the active server node. 

For Instance: If you want to monitor the Enterprise Single Sign On service, which will be running under the active SQL server. Then add the Network Server Name  "NETSQLCLUS" for monitoring. Then the BizTalk360 will automatically pick the active server name BT360-SQLCLUS1 and the services running under active SQL node. You can start monitoring  the Enterprise Single Sign on service by setting the expected state as below.

In case of any Fail over is happened, the network server will be automatically switch to the Active Server (Failover Node) BT360-SQLCLUS2 and the NT service will also get switch to the active server node.Then The BizTalk360, NT services configuration will automatically mapped to the same service available in the active node (fail over node) and it starts monitoring the service with the existing configuration as below

In case, if the Configured NT Services is not in the active node (Fail-over node) then the services will get orphaned and removed for monitoring.

Setting up monitoring for NT Services

• Log in to the BizTalk360 application
• Click 'Monitoring' in the navigation panel 
• Click the expand button against 'Manage Mapping' tab and depending on your requirement, select the 'BizTalk Servers' link or the SQL Servers' link
• Select the BizTalk or SQL Server for which you want to set up the monitoring on NT services
• Select the Alarm name (See Creating an alarm) from the drop down for which you would like to associate the alerts
• At the tab pages at the top, select NT Services
• Choose the NT Services that you wish to monitor and receive the alerts
• Select the check box against the NT Services to activate the alerts
• Set the value of Expected State by selecting from the value from 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 Stopped

Monitoring Clustered NT Services

User can monitor clustered NT services by setting up the expected state of the clustered service as "At least one Active".The BizTalk360 monitoring service will ensure that the configured service is always up and running in any of the respective clustered nodes.  An alert will get triggered to the configured email-Id when the service goes down in all the nodes.

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 at least one of the clustered nodes.  This can be easily achieved through BizTalk360 NT service monitoring.

The user can also set up AutoCorrect for this. In this case, when the SSO service goes down in both the clustered nodes, then the BizTalk360 monitoring service will automatically try to start the service in any of the nodes. With this, you can ensure that there is no downtime of the service.