Blog Home  Home |  Breeze Home RSS 2.0 Atom 1.0 CDF  
Mick's Breeze Blogs - Biztalk/Sharepoint/... - Monday, October 29, 2007
Things hard and not so hard....
 Monday, October 29, 2007

The boys (some how the girls weren't up for the hairy upper lip competition?) are up for the Movember challenge and are taking the bull by the horns.

It's all about donations to Prostrate Cancer Foundation and hair - lots of both!!

So I'd love you guys to sponsor (tax deductible) us - Team 'Lost My Mow-o', all you need to do is:
- jump to this location Sponsorship and enter my rego number: 92055
(or you can search using my name - Mick Badran)

Be great to have you aboard the Movember machine!

First few days should be ok, once I start getting the itch it's going to be alot harder!

Thanks for your support!

Monday, October 29, 2007 1:26:46 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   General  | 
 Friday, October 26, 2007

Well I recently went down the task of upgrading my notebook to x64 - Win2008 RC0.
So far so good - a little hunting for the vital drivers (bluetooth) and it's rocking.

I then went to continue on with some BizTalk RFID work and boom!!! I forgot that I needed to update these drivers also smile_cry.

Fortunately after some researching (knew I'd put that Computer Engineering degree to good use) - I found the drivers I needed, although they don't say "DLP RFID Drivers...."

Essentially they are some sort of USB port converter - works fine with the DLP_RFID demo program.....cool.......

When you install the Drivers - from Device Manager, select 'Update Driver....' and explicitly point to the root of the DLP x64 driver's folder. From here you will be presented with 4 driver options.

Select 'USB Serial Converter' .....you're away!

I've done all the hard work for you - grab them here

dlpReady

Friday, October 26, 2007 2:35:27 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   BizTalk | RFID | Tips  | 
 Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Hi guys, if you've ever embarked down the 'hey I want to monitor my bts system through Operations Center 2007', you'll realise that there is a fair conversion process to take the original BTS2006 MOM Pack from *.AKM format to the newer *.XML format.

Essentially you do:

1) Install a conversion tool on MOM 2005 SP1 machine

2) run the conversion process

3) take the exported file to your Operations Manager 2007

4) Import the *.XML to Ops Mgr 2007 to generate the classes.


Or........ you could download the ready made version - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=389FCB89-F4CF-46D7-BC6E-57830D234F91&displaylang=en

Wow what a winner!!!!

Problem solved....... cross that one off the list smile_regular

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 3:59:57 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   BizTalk | General | Tips  | 
 Tuesday, October 16, 2007

http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalk_core_engine/archive/2007/03/31/hidden-gem-in-biztalk-2006-r2.aspx

The instances table in the msgbox has a newly added column (in R2 only) to that shows the shape on where the Orch is blocked on.

So if there's a stack of Dehydrated Orchs in your system, you know what they are waiting on rather than use Orch Debugger.

Thanks Lee, you'll be missed!

Mick.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:43:42 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   BizTalk | Insights | Tips  | 

You've been working away playing with the great DLP devices, reading tags and making things go 'beep'.

BizTalk RFID RTM-ed not too long ago (Sept 14th was public release) and with that, your DLP provider needs to be updated - last time, I promise.

To save you the pain, Scotty and I have been through this for you and provided the Device Provider Assemblies.zip (56.44 KB) (updated) for your pleasure (or is that leisure?)

Scotty is a man of many words and he explains the 'Way of the Peaceful warriors' path that must be walked to achieve the goal.

Enjoy guys - I'll be letting you in on some big announcements soon.....(I'm not pregnant! smile_regular)

Mick.


Tuesday, October 16, 2007 4:12:35 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   BizTalk | RFID | Tips  | 
 Monday, October 15, 2007

Which one are you??

 

This is cool-have some one watch this with you-you may see her spin one way and the other person may see her spin the other way......or....look away and look back and she may change direction....



Scroll down to make heads or tails out of this......

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of your brain.

If anti-clockwise, then you use more of the left side of your brain.

 

It is possible to focus and change the direction of the dancer; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS





uses logic

uses feeling

detail oriented

"big picture" oriented

facts rule

imagination rules

words and language

symbols and images

present and past

present and future

math and science

philosophy & religion

can comprehend

can "get it" (i.e. meaning)

knowing

believes

acknowledges

appreciates

order/pattern perception

Spatial perception

knows object name

Knows object function

reality based

fantasy based

forms strategies

presents possibilities

practical

impetuous

safe

risk taking

 

 

 



Monday, October 15, 2007 12:07:49 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [1]    | 
 Saturday, October 13, 2007

Hard working and always available 'Big Kev' aka Scott Scovell has come up with a gem in his latest blog post.

Grab the sequence and the order of components, as well as finer details around the need to change BizTalk RFID Services from using your default website (usually if Sharepoint is on the box, then it's a good idea to)

Well done Scotty! Nice one.

Saturday, October 13, 2007 6:32:58 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   RFID | General | Tips  | 

Well what a week.....I've finally put a media interview that I originally started with Steve Sloan and Christine Bishop for Aussie FEN Magazine. I was there representing the local industry topology around RFID and MS RFID Services.

It was one of those things that as we were all talking, I did have a thought flash across my mind - "Mick if that comment is taken the wrong way, or you say the wrong thing......then you'd better cherish your last MVP year :)"

Coming through the other side and a Podcast later - it's all looking very cool. There's some great news to be released in this space....more on this later.

Anush Kumar Mr RFID Services himself - had a ball at the R2 Launch and we got to once again hang out. All superb!
There's a handful of people who you meet in your travels that are just great guys.....he's one! And I'm overlooking the fact he wants to get out there on the cricket pitch and play for India!
http://blogs.msdn.com/biztalkrfid/archive/2007/09/28/other-biztalk-rfid-ers-in-blogosphere.aspx - it's all true folks :)

Another guy who's making huge leaps and bounds in the RFID space is our very own Scott Scovell. Scott and I are working on some serious RFID stuff at the moment and he also has a wealth of stories/knowledge from right down at the coal face in not only implementing BizTalk RFID Services but a very good head for the whole integration environment. Stay tuned....... I promise we'll share soon :)

Rocking and rolling.....

Saturday, October 13, 2007 6:26:10 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   BizTalk | RFID | Events | General  | 

I was onsite the other day on a WinXP machine doing some work. I had a few moments to kill before I entered the time of 'men are men....and women are satisfied' and had to perform (something close :)

I came across http://universal-vista-inspirat.en.softonic.com/ie/screenshots

These guys have done some great work around the screen, UI, control panel, applets and there's even a MacOS x still chooser bar......stacks of options. (e.g. I love the number of 'bounces' an icon will do when you double click on it to launch the app) - all free.

This has got the big thumbs up from me..... I'm very tempted to install XP just for this theme!

Saturday, October 13, 2007 5:53:04 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   General  | 
 Friday, October 12, 2007

A friend of mine Dan, gave a great recount of his very first experience with BizTalk when I came in and built a prototype in a couple of days (no pressure or anything - not that the business decision makers were watching over my shoulder at every move). Later I realised that Dan's company was doing the 'Pepsi' challenge on me, by giving Microsoft and the others a set of 25 tasks to do within the integration space.

No pre-canned demos, real live sink or swim stuff. Two days later I came out of the 'Tribal Council' with immunity and they had a great path forward. I then went on to help them with their actual implementations.

Dan recounts a little of this encounter here - http://techtalkblogs.com/blog/archive/2007/10/10/3221.aspx

Friday, October 12, 2007 6:29:04 PM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   BizTalk | Insights | General | Tips  | 
 Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I came across this article some time ago and always needed a reference to it.

So I thought I'd pin it to my mental noteboard in the sky for all to share.....

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/6a13cd9f-4b44-40d6-85aa-c70a8e5c34fe1033.mspx?pf=true

Great article on how much MOSS/WSS can handle, from speed differences with site enumerations through to max elements in lists and doc libraries. Some very good numbers

Enjoy!

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 9:18:57 AM (AUS Eastern Standard Time, UTC+10:00)  #    Comments [0]   MOSS | Office  | 
 Sunday, October 07, 2007

Monitoring tends to be one of those areas that's overlooked until you hit Defcon 5 in production, servers are melting all over the floor, people are suddenly disappearing and cashing in on their time owing, and there's not one business process in site...... sound familiar?

I've always been fascinated at given the price of MOM (mega cheap) why people don't have effective monitoring solutions in place - it's not rocket science to setup.....or you could have the work experience kid watching the lights on the front of the servers to make sure they're on! :)

Here's some details from the R2 Management pack....check them out.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa561939.aspx 

snippet of the msdn page - BTW at the bottom it mentions MOM2005, this will also work in Operation Manager 2007

------------------------------------------

Contents of the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack

The Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack enables you to:

  • Monitor BizTalk Server events.
  • Collect BizTalk Server-specific performance counters in one central location.
  • Raise alerts that require operator intervention.

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Management Pack contains rules that cover the following categories:

  • Availability Monitoring
    Availability monitoring rules monitor the availability of service from computers running BizTalk Server. Unavailability of the BizTalk Server service, receive locations, and databases are issues that cause the BizTalk Server service to become unavailable to a client or a user. Availability monitoring rules have names prefixed with "Service Unavailable.”
  • Health Monitoring
    Health monitoring rules monitor for different types of errors in BizTalk Server that require operator intervention. There are four types of health monitoring rules, which have names prefixed with "Error," "Critical Error," "Warning," and "Information:"
    • Error: Errors are events that usually represent processing problems with individual messages. In isolation they represent problems that can be rectified either at the sender end or the receiver end of a message transmission.
    • Critical Error: Critical errors represent events that indicate a significant problem has occurred. This can affect a large degree of functionality of BizTalk Server.
    • Warning: Warnings are typically problems that are intermittent in nature. They do not represent major problems in operation and may be considered lower priority compared to other alerts.
    • Information: Information alerts include information about BizTalk Server. These messages are neither errors nor warnings.
  • Utilization/Performance Tracking
    Utilization/performance tracking rules enable you to monitor the operationally relevant performance counters for BizTalk Server. These are divided into measurement rules and comparison rules.
Availability MonitoringAvailability Monitoring

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Core rule group contains the following rules to address availability monitoring, that is, monitoring related to whether BizTalk Server is currently operable, and able to process work. All of the rules are configured to suppress duplicate alerts for identical event content. This means that a repeat count will be incremented for a single alert rather than seeing multiple alert instances in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Operator Console. This helps to avoid a flood of alerts that an administrator must deal with; too much information can be as problematic as too little. None of the rules contain automated responses, such as e-mail/pager notifications, though you can easily add these as needed.

Rule Name Enabled

Service Unavailable: A receive location is shutting down.

Yes

Service Unavailable: All receive locations are being temporarily disabled because either the MessageBox or Configuration database is not available.

Yes

Service Unavailable: BAM Portal cannot connect to Primary Import Database - Login failed.

Yes

Service Unavailable: BizTalk HTTP receive adapter failed to initialize itself.

Yes

Service Unavailable: Error connecting to the BAM Primary Import Database - Db not found.

Yes

Service Unavailable: Failed to connect to BizTalk Management database.

Yes

Service Unavailable: Failed to initialize UPM profile context.

Yes

Service Unavailable: The Messaging Engine could not contact the SSO server.

Yes

Service Unavailable: The Messaging Engine encountered an error initializing a receive adapter.

Yes

Service Unavailable: The Messaging Engine failed to initialize a transport adapter.

Yes

Health MonitoringHealth Monitoring

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Core rule group contains the following rules to address health monitoring, that is, monitoring related to various non-fatal failure modes. Typically, the situation may be isolated to individual interchanges or may possibly resolve itself. The BizTalk Server service is still, in some capacity, able to process work. The primary intent of these rules is to provide operations staff with information relating to messages that are stuck in the system and that require manual intervention of some sort, and to give them the information required to rectify the root problem.

All of these rules are configured to suppress duplicate alerts for identical event content. This means that a repeat count will be incremented for a single alert rather than seeing multiple alert instances in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Operator Console. None of the rules contain automated responses, but you can easily add such responses if necessary.

Rule Name Enabled

Consolidate Inbound Message Rejected on Authentication Failure

Yes

Critical Error: A BizTalk host instance has stopped and is not processing information.

Yes

Critical Error: A BizTalk subservice has failed while executing a service request

Yes

Critical Error: A stored procedure call failed.

Yes

Critical Error: Monitor BizTalk NT Service Availability

Yes

Critical Error: The Messaging Engine failed to register an adapter.

Yes

Critical Error: The Messaging Engine failed to retrieve the configuration from the database.

Yes

Critical Error: The MSMQT subservice failed to start because Windows MSMQ service is running on the computer.

Yes

Error connecting to the BAM Primary Import Database – DB server not found

Yes

Error: A message going to a one-way send port is being suspended. The send port configuration corresponding to the message was not found.

Yes

Error: A receive location is invalid or incorrectly configured.

Yes

Error: A response message is suspended.

Yes

Error: An adapter raised an error during message processing.

Yes

Error: An attempt to connect to a BizTalk database failed.

Yes

Error: An outbound message is being suspended by the adapter.

Yes

Error: BAM Interceptor detected a SQL Exception

Yes

Error: BAM Portal Encountered Internal Server Error

Yes

Error: BAM Portal Encountered Internal Server Exception - Web Services may have received badly-formatted requests

Yes

Error: BAM Technical Assistance Required

Yes

Error: Connection to a SMTP host failed

Yes

Error: Error connecting to the BAM Primary Import Database - Referenced DB not found

Yes

Error: Failed to archive the processed message.

Yes

Error: Failed to delete processed message

Yes

Error: Failed to un-mark the file

Yes

Error: FILE-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: FTP-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: HTTP-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: Invalid IC Schema Error

Yes

Error: Messaging Engine has suspended a message. Failed to correlate a response message to an existing request message.

Yes

Error: MQSeries-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: MSMQ-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: Orchestration instance suspended due to errors, needs manual intervention

Yes

Error: POP3 adapter could not authenticate to the server using supplied credentials

Yes

Error: POP3 adapter could not establish connection with the POP3 server

Yes

Error: POP3-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: SMTP send adapter could not authenticate with the SMTP server

Yes

Error: SOAP-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: SQL-Receive-Message Suspended

Yes

Error: The FILE send adapter cannot open file for writing.

Yes

Error: The host instance failed to connect to the BizTalk Configuration database.

Yes

Error: The HTTP send adapter cannot connect to the remote server.

Yes

Error: The Messaging Engine is dropping the message due to an authentication failure.

Yes

Error: The processed file is either read-only or a system file.

Yes

Error: There was a failure executing a receive pipeline at an http receive location.

Yes

Error: There was a failure executing a receive pipeline.

No

Generic Error: All error events from BizTalk Server 2006

No

Generic Information: All information events from BizTalk Server 2006

No

Generic Warning: All warning events from BizTalk Server 2006

No

Information: A BizTalk Server Host Instance Windows Service Has Stopped

No

Information: Mismatched Interceptor Configuration

Yes

The Messaging Engine has suspended one or more inbound message(s).

No

The Messaging Engine has suspended one or more outbound message(s).

No

There was a failure executing a send pipeline.

No

There was an error executing a pipeline component.

No

Warning: Cube DTS has not been run

Yes

Warning: FILE receive adapter cannot reach a receive location due to network problems

Yes

Warning: TDDS failed to batch execution of streams

Yes

Warning: The Messaging Engine encountered an error publishing a batch of messages.

Yes

Utilization/Performance TrackingUtilization/Performance Tracking

There are two types of performance rules within MOM: measurement rules and comparison rules. Measurement rules gather data from Microsoft Windows performance counters, or other data sources, with a specified sampling rate between 5 and 15 minutes and store the data for historical analysis. Comparison rules allow actions to be taken and alerts to be raised when a given performance value varies by a specified threshold from expected values, which can include averages of past samples. Some of the comparison rules require customization based on your particular environment. In addition, you can change the default sampling rates as needed based on your environment.

The table below shows the performance rules for the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Core rule group.

Note
All of the counter values for the BizTalk Tracking Data Decode Service (TDDS), otherwise known as the BAM Event Bus Service, performance object are stored with 15 minute samples.

Note
Within the XLANG/s Orchestrations performance object, all counters are stored with 15 minute samples, except the following: Megabytes Allocated Private Memory, Orchestrations Created, Orchestrations Created/sec.

Measurement Rule Name Enabled

BizTalk Messaging Active Receive Locations

Yes

BizTalk Messaging Inbound Latency

Yes

BizTalk Messaging Outbound Latency

Yes

BizTalk Messaging Request-Response Latency

Yes

BizTalk Messaging Request-Response Timeouts

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter % Web Service Call Failures

No

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Receive Commit Failures

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Receive Message Failures

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Received Messages

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Send Message Failures

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Sent Messages

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Web Service Call Failures

Yes

BizTalk: WSS Adapter Total Web Service Calls/sec

Yes

BizTalk:TDDS Total Events

Yes

BizTalk:TDDS Total Records

Yes

BizTalk:TDDS-Total Failed Events

Yes

CPU Usage BizTalk Machines

Yes

CPU Usage BizTalk Server Process

Yes

CPU Usage BizTalk Server Processes

Yes

CPU Usage BizTalk Servers

Yes

Documents processed

Yes

Documents processed/sec

Yes

Documents received

Yes

Documents received/sec

Yes

Documents suspended

Yes

Documents suspended/sec

Yes

FILE receive Adapter Bytes

Yes

FILE Receive Adapter Bytes/Sec

Yes

FILE Receive Adapter Messages Received / Sec

Yes

FILE Receive Adapter-Messages received

Yes

FILE Send Adapter Bytes

Yes

FILE Send Adapter Bytes/Sec

Yes

FILE Send Adapter Messages Sent / Sec

Yes

FILE Send Adapter-Messages Sent

Yes

FTP Receive Adapter Bytes Received

Yes

FTP Receive Adapter Bytes Received/sec

Yes

FTP Receive Adapter Messages Received

Yes

FTP Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec

Yes

FTP Send Adapter Bytes

Yes

FTP Send Adapter Bytes/Sec

Yes

FTP Send Adapter Messages Sent

Yes

FTP Send Adapter Messages/Second

Yes

Host - Instance State Message References - BizTalkServerInProcessHost

Yes

Host Queue Size - All BizTalk Hosts

Yes

Host Suspended Queue Size - All BizTalk Hosts

Yes

HostQ - Instances - BizTalkServerInProcessHost

Yes

HTTP Receive Adapter Messages Received / Sec

Yes

HTTP Receive Adapter Response Messages Sent / Sec

Yes

HTTP Receive Adapter-Messages received

Yes

HTTP Receive Adapter-Response Messages sent

Yes

HTTP Send Adapter Messages Received

Yes

HTTP Send Adapter Messages Received/Sec

Yes

HTTP Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec

Yes

HTTP Send Adapter-Messages Sent

Yes

ID Process

Yes

Logical Disk %Free Space BizTalk Servers

Yes

MessageBox databases connection failures

Yes

MessageBox Dead Processes Cleanup

Yes

MessageBox Instances Size

Yes

MessageBox Msg Cleanup

Yes

MessageBox Parts Cleanup

Yes

MessageBox Spool Size

Yes

MessageBox Tracked Message Copy

Yes

MessageBox Tracking Data Size

Yes

MSMQ Receive Adapter Bytes Received

Yes

MSMQ Receive Adapter Bytes/Sec

Yes

MSMQ Receive Adapter Messages Received

Yes

MSMQ Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec

Yes

MSMQ Send Adapter Bytes Sent

Yes

MSMQ Send Adapter Bytes/Sec

Yes

MSMQ Send Adapter Messages Sent

Yes

MSMQ Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec

Yes

Orchestrations completed

Yes

Orchestrations completed/sec

Yes

Orchestrations Created

Yes

Orchestrations Created/sec

Yes

Orchestrations dehydrated

Yes

Orchestrations dehydrated/sec

Yes

Orchestrations discarded

Yes

Orchestrations discarded/sec

Yes

Orchestrations rehydrated

Yes

Orchestrations rehydrated/sec

Yes

Orchestrations resident in-memory

Yes

Orchestrations suspended

Yes

Orchestrations suspended/sec

Yes

Orchestrations-% used physical memory

Yes

Orchestrations-Database transactions

Yes

Orchestrations-Database transactions/sec

Yes

Orchestrations-Dehydratable orchestrations

Yes

Orchestrations-Dehydrating orchestrations

Yes

Orchestrations-Idle orchestrations

Yes

Orchestrations-Megabytes allocated private memory-<All>-15.0-minutes

Yes

Orchestrations-Megabytes allocated virtual memory

Yes

Orchestrations-Pending messages

Yes

Orchestrations-Pending work items

Yes

Physical Disk %Idle Time BizTalk Servers

Yes

Physical Disk Average Disk Queue Length BizTalk Server

Yes

POP3 Receive Adapter Active Sessions

Yes

POP3 Receive Adapter Bytes Received

Yes

POP3 Receive Adapter Bytes/Sec

Yes

POP3 Receive Adapter Messages Received

Yes

POP3 Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec

Yes

Runnable orchestrations

Yes

Running orchestrations

Yes

SMTP Send Adapter Messages Sent

Yes

SMTP Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec

Yes

SOAP Receive Adapter Messages Received

Yes

SOAP Receive Adapter Messages Received /Sec

Yes

SOAP Send Adapter Messages Sent

Yes

SOAP Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec

Yes

SQL Receive Adapter Messages Received

Yes

SQL Receive Adapter Messages Received/Sec

Yes

SQL Send Adapter Messages Sent

Yes

SQL Send Adapter Messages Sent/Sec

Yes

Comparison Rule Name Enabled

Monitor Host Suspended Q Size

No

Monitor HostQ Size

No

Monitor HostQ Size - BizTalkServerApplication

No

Monitor MessageBox Instances Size

No

Monitor MessageBox Spool Size

No

Monitor MessageBox Tracking Data Siz