Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

11.4. Troubleshooting BizTalk

The ability to troubleshoot and resolve problems as quickly as possible is an essential skill in the modern enterprise. To minimize the number of problems that need to be resolved, rigorous development, coding, testing, deployment, and source code control processes should be followed. However, even if all these aspects are handled correctly and the advice laid out in this book is followed, it is likely that you will at some point have to troubleshoot and resolve an issue. Part of my role at Microsoft involves dealing with critical situations (called CritSits internally); these occur when a BizTalk customer somewhere in the world has a problem that results in their system suffering downtime. This section covers the tools used by internal Microsoft engineers to resolve these situations, including the out-of-the-box tools plus others that have been developed by people working in the field to speed up problem resolution.

11.4.1. Checking the Health of Your BizTalk System

As previously stated, most enterprise applications contain many components. This is particularly the case for integration applications that are built on BizTalk. These types of applications are likely to contain and communicate with products from the Microsoft stack and other third parties. Therefore, the health of your application cannot normally be determined merely by the state of BizTalk; it is important that all the components are monitored.

This section will show how the tools ...