Service Instances

For a healthy BizTalk environment, it’s important to keep an eye on the number of service instances in the environment. Having a large number of suspended service instances will bloat your message box database and adversely effect the overall performance of your environment. In some cases it could be an issue with the environment, ex: If the host instance is not started and you get messages that kick off the service instances, then those instances will be in "Ready to Run" state until the host instance is started. If no one starts that host instance, the service instances are going to get accumulated bloating the message box.

Typically support people keep an eye on the service instances count via the BizTalk Administrator group hub page. But it’s the not the ideal solution for a human being to always keep an eye on this count. The person who is monitoring this, need to be a BizTalk expert and understand the importance of each state. The group hub page only displays the instance count and it wont tell you whether they are expected count or not.

The service instances can be in any of the below states:

• Ready to Run
• Scheduled
• Dehydrated
• Suspended, Resumable
• Suspended, Non-resumable
• Active
• In Breakpoint

BizTalk360 allows you to set the warning and error threshold levels (instances count) for each one of the above states at application level. Once the number of instances count increases above the threshold, the system will send notification alert.

Setting Up Alerts For Service Instances

• Log in to the BizTalk360 application
• Click 'Monitoring' in the navigation panel
• Click the expand button against 'Manage Mapping' tab and select 'Applications' link
• Select the Application for which you want to set up the monitoring
• Select the Alarm name (see Creating an alarm) from the drop down for which you would like to associate the alerts
• Choose the Service Instance States for which you would like to receive the alerts
• Select the check box against the service instance state to activate the alerts
• You can edit the warning threshold and error threshold levels by clicking the Edit link