NT Services
  • 11 Apr 2022
  • 3 Minutes to read
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NT Services

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Article Summary

In this section, we will see how to set up monitoring of NT Services in BizTalk server using BizTalk360.

Monitoring the NT Services in BizTalk Server

Windows NT services can automatically get started when the system boots up, while a few of them require manual intervention to get them started. As important as 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, 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 in these states. 


Setting up monitoring for NT Services

  • Log in to the BizTalk360 application
  • Click 'Monitoring' in the navigation panel 
  • Click the expand button against the 'Manage Mapping' tab and depending on your requirement, select the 'BizTalk Servers' link 
  • Select the BizTalk server from the drop-down for which you want to set up the monitoring on NT services
  • Select the Alarm name (See Manage Alarms) 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 the 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 Running 
  • You can also monitor the startup type and log on as an account for the above monitoring NT Services by simply clicking on the NT Service 
    • Set the expected state for Startup type as Auto / Manual, Disabled  Do Not Monitor, Automatic (Delayed/Triggered start )
    • Set the expected logon as Local user, Domain user, Local Service, NT Service account,etc 
  • View the detailed monitoring result of the above-mapped state alert, logon alert Start up type alert by clicking on the eye icon in the respective NT Services 


Monitored Results of NT Service will look like below 


You can stop monitoring by setting the expected state as 'DoNotMonitor'.

Monitoring Clustered NT Services

You 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.

For better understanding, the clustered nodes are grouped with similar color codes.

You 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.


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