Manage Alarms

Understanding Alarms

The first step in monitoring using BizTalk360 is to create Alarms. Alarms in BizTalk360 act like a package that contains all the components that need to be monitored.

Example: You may want to monitor artifacts in a few BizTalk applications together.

Alarms help you to achieve this objective. While creating the alarm, you can also configure how you want to receive the alerts, by configuring one or more of the available Notification channels, like e-mail, SMS, Slack, ServiceNow, and so on.

Alarm types

In BizTalk360, at the top level there are 3 main types of alarm you can create:

• Threshold violation alarms - used when a condition is violated, for example: a disabled Receive Location
• Health Check Notification alarms - used for scheduled Health/Status check
• Data Monitoring alarms - used to set up monitoring against message processing

The Create Alarm screen is flexible; you can simply create a Threshold alarm, a Health Check alarm, or a Data Monitoring alarm. You can also consolidate all mentioned alarm types in the same alarm.

Note: BizTalk360 has some limitations for normal users. Only Super Users can create, manage and monitor alarms and give access to Normal users for monitoring dashboard.

Threshold violation alarms

Threshold alarms in BizTalk360 can be set to send immediately (or based on configurable persist duration) alerts when a threshold condition is violated in the environment. If required, you can configure to monitor threshold violation only during specific times on days (say, weekdays between 09:00 and 17:00), which is useful if you want to monitor only during business hours. If you want to monitor between specific business hours and you enter a Start Time, BizTalk360 automatically sets the End Time to one hour later than the Start time. Of course, you can override that End Time yourself.
BizTalk360 can also be configured to notify you when, after an exception, the situation becomes normal again. You can also limit the number of alerts that will be sent (otherwise you may end up with an indefinite number of alerts being received for the same issue). There is another powerful functionality available to reset the alarm once the specified notification limit is reached.

For this example: In case a Threshold violation occurs on business days between 01:10 PM and 02:10 PM, which lasts for 01 minutes or more, Siva from kovai.co need to be notified by email, with a maximum of 1 alert per violation. When the maximum alert notification is reached, the alert will get reset after 06 minutes.

Health Check Notification alarms

It's one of the common practices in supporting a BizTalk environment for support people to maintain daily/weekly routine to take a look at the overall health status of BizTalk environment(s). BizTalk360 helps to automate that process by creating a daily health check/status alarm at set timing (ex: Mon-Fri, 9 AM). When you are creating an alarm, on the "Health Monitoring Alert" page, you can set up the alarms to monitor the health of the environment on a periodic basis. You can configure the days/times as per your convenience/requirement.

For this example: Siva from Kovai.co, need to receive Health status reports by email. They want to receive that report every business day from Monday to Friday every hour except 17:00, 18:00, 19:00 hours.

Data Monitoring alarms

BizTalk360 contains multiple query builders to, for example, query the Message Box database to search for running and suspended service instances. You can also use a query builder to look out for information about Tracked Service Instances and Tracked Message Events. Similarly, query builders exist to query BAM views, perform EDI activity search, and filter out the ESB exceptions.
Besides manually querying, BizTalk360 also allows you to monitor all these data points. To be able to create data/activity related monitors, you need to create Data Monitoring alarms.

For this example: Siva wants to receive alerts, based on non-events to happen. To achieve that, the first step is to create a Data Monitoring alarm.

To know more about creating alarms please click this link.

Clone Alarm

The Clone Alarm option allows you to copy all settings from one alarm to another, including configuration about all the monitored components.

Follow the below steps to clone an Alarm:

1. In the 'Manage Alarms' screen, select an existing alarm; a button bar appears
2. In the button bar, click 'Clone'. A window appears where you can provide the following:
   • Alarm configuration - All the configuration details of an alarm
   • Artifacts Mappings - Applications, BizTalk/SQL Servers, BizTalk Environment, Queues, File Locations artifacts mapped for monitoring and the data monitoring configurations
3.  Provide the 'Alarm Name' of the new alarm
4. To copy artifact mappings along with alarm configuration, enable the 'Clone Alarm with Artifacts Mappings' option

Switch View

The Switch View option allows you to change card or list view of the manage alarms page. Once the view is selected the same view persists until the user changes the view for next time. let see views in detail below  

Card View

By default, the manage alarms page is set to Card view. In Card View, Alarm Name, Status of the alarm, Alarm types that configured, Email id's, Priority of the Alarm, Alarm persist duration, Alerts sent count and Auto-Reset properties are displayed in the view panel.

An advantage of the Card view is you can change make changes by selecting the feature, say example, to increase the Auto reset count select the drop-down of the Auto reset, change the count and save the value.

List View

By selecting the switch view you are allowed to change from Card view to List view. In List View, Alarm Name, Status of the alarm, Alarm types that configured, Email id's, Priority of the Alarm, Alarm persist duration, Alerts sent count and Auto-Reset properties are displayed in the grid.

Filters

The filters for the manage alarms are now changed dynamically according to the view/theme of the alarm that we have opted for.

When you select Card View, the filters will be available on the right corner of the view.

When you select List View, the filters will be available at the top within the List view.

Pin to Dashboard

Pin to Dashboard, functionality allows the user to pin the Manage alarms page to the dashboard of both Administration and Analytics. It will help us to easily redirect from the Monitoring/Analytics dashboard to the Manage alarms page.

Alarm User Access Policy

Superusers can define which alarm can be accessed by which level of users. Normal / NT group users can view the particular alarms and their details in Manage alarms, Dashboard, Group dashboard, Manage Mapping, Data monitoring, Notification History, and Governance & Audit sections only if they have access to that particular alarms. However, this is read-only, to manage the alarm or to create a new alarm user must have access to 'Manage Alarm'. 

Say for instance if the normal user has access to Alarm 1 and Alarm 2, they can only view the mappings and status of the alarm in the dashboard and other areas but they can't manage that alarms. To edit or delete the alarms Alarm 1 and Alarm 2  normal user must have access to 'Manage Alarm'.

Note - To access any of the monitoring features user must have access to the manage alarm section or at least any one of the alarms.