As mentioned here, in BHM v3.2 we decoupled the Query/Rules and Maintenance repositories from the tool itself.  This was done so we could provide repository updates via Azure without having to release a new version of BHM itself.  We still included the latest versions of these repository files with the DLC package. 

Depending on the OS and security configuration, the 2 repository files (MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and MaintenanceRep.dll) can be blocked by the OS when downloaded from DLC and cause the below mentioned issues. 

Scroll to the bottom to see the solution.

When adding a new profile:

MMC has detected an error in a snap-in and will unload it.

Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Exception type: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException

 When modifying profile settings:

Information level tab is missing query list under "Query Level" label:

Queries tab is missing query list:

Rules tab is missing rules list:

When connecting to BizTalk from the Maintenance node:

Error to load the Maintenance repository :Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\BizTalkHealthMonitor\MaintenanceRep.dll' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)

SOLUTION:

Tell Windows not to block these 2 repository files.

1. Close BHM
2. Go to the BHM installation folder (default is C:\Program Files (x86)\BizTalkHealthMonitor)
3. Right-click on MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and go to properties
4. Note the security warning at the bottom:
   
5. Check Unblock and click OK.
6. Also follow steps 3-5 for MaintenanceRep.dll

Once you have unblocked the file, you should no longer see the security warning when you go back into file properties and all of the above mentioned errors related to loading repositories should be resolved.

Notes:

• If you have not yet installed BHM v3.2, you can also follow the above steps on the unzipped package prior to installing BHM.
• In some cases, we've seen that the "Unblock" option is not there when BHMv3.2.zip was unzipped using a 3rd party tool.  To unzip, right-click on BHMv3.2.zip and choose Extract All.

1. Auto-Update Repositories
2. Analyze option at the start-up
3. Import existing BHM reports
4. Repository Updates

1. Query\Rule repository – Used for analyzing your BizTalk environment and generating the report, same as MBV.
2. Maintenance repository – Used to execute BizTalk Database related maintenance tasks, same as Terminator.

While we will ship these repositories with every BHM release, all the in-between updates to these repositories will be available on Microsoft Azure Cloud, which can be downloaded and used by BizTalk Health Monitor without re-installing the entire setup. This is possible only with v3.2 release and not with the earlier ones. We understand that your BizTalk environment may not have access to the internet, hence it also comes up with an offline way to check for the new updates and download them. You need to manually copy them over to the machine where you have BizTalk Health Monitor installed. We have done some changes to the BHM core to support this feature, let’s have a look at them:

1. Get/Set Repository Updates - You can use this option either to check for the latest repository update available or set the duration of days in which BHM should check for the updates. This option will work only on machines with internet access. To use this feature, right click on BizTalk Health Monitor root node and select “Repository Update”

   This will open a up a new window, as shown following:

   Here you can click on “Check now” which will check for the latest repository available online. If it does, it will provide you an option to download them. If not, it will pop-up a message stating that your repositories are up to date.

   You can also set the number of days in which you want BHM to check for the updated repositories and prompt you if available. Default is 15 days.

2. Check Repository Version – You can check the version of repositories your BHM setup is using by right clicking on BizTalk Health Monitor root node and select “About BizTalk Health Monitor”. This will pop-up a new windows which will show the version of BHM along with it’s repositories. You should refer to “Query/rules repository assembly” and “Maintenance repository assembly”. The date it shows is the last time when the repository was downloaded on your machine.

   
3. Offline repository check– When you install BHM 3.2 you will get a utility named “ChkBHMRep.exe”. You can find it under the BHM installation folder. In scenarios when you don’t have access to the internet from BHM machine, follow these steps to compare and update the BHM repositories:
   1. Copy following files to the machine with internet access
      1. ChkBHMRep.exe
      2. Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.dll
      3. MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll
      4. MaintenanceRep.dll
   2. Run “ChkBHMRep.exe”

   3. This will compare the version of repository files of your machine with what’s available online and prompt you to download the assemblies if out dated. If you don’t copy the last two files, it will always prompt you to download as it will consider those files as missing. If you have the updated assemblies, it will complete the update check and provide the assemblies version found.

      

Select the profiles that you wish to be analyze at the BHM Start-Up Click “Analyze now” to start the analysis for selected profiles Click “Ok” to close the dialogue box without starting the analysis and to save the checkbox selections Use the last check box to choose if you wish to see this pop-up or not

Now you can use the BHM dashboard to view and analyze an existing BHM or MBV report. When you import a report all the default rules are populated and displayed in the BHM dashboard. Imported reports doesn’t honor any customer rules or dashboard customization. To import an existing report, right click on BHM root node and select “Import existing report”. This will open up a dialog box where you have to provide:

1. Path of the folder where report is saved
2. Name of the report

1. Latest CU check for all BizTalk Server versions
2. Updated “Count Instances (and Save Messages)” view task to include instance status filter.
3. Modified the WMI engine to better handles failures in BizTalk WMI API calls.

1. Download BizTalk Health Monitor from Microsoft Download Center
2. Unzip BHMv3.2.zip by right-clicking on the file and choosing Extract All.
3. In order to avoid this issue, right-click on MYHCQueries_MBVQueries.dll and check Unblock and click OK if you see the following warning:
4. Repeat step 3 for MaintenanceRep.dll.
5. Launch BHMSetup.exe as an administrator, it will open the installation screen as shown below
   
6. Under Options you can:
   • change the installation location of BHM
   • choose to create a shortcut of BHM on the desktop
   • choose to launch BHM after the setup is completed
   • choose to include BizTalk Administration Console in BHM MMC. Note, that this doesn’t replace the existing BizTalk Administration Console. Also, this option is not available in BizTalk 2010.  In order to integrate the BizTalk Admin Console with BHM in BizTalk 2010, see “How to integrate BHM SnapIn” section here.
7. Click on “Start Installing” to begin the installation. You will get a message when installation gets completed. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds.
   
8. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC.
   

1-      Easy-To-Setup project for BHM

2-      Improved auto-proposal of maintenance tasks using From latest BHM report

3-      Added View Current Shape of Orchestrations to BHM report

4-      Terminate Caching Items (Hard Termination) to maintenance node

5-      Updated repository with new queries and rules

Easy-To-Setup project for BHM

No manual steps required to get going with BHM! With the new setup project, using BHM and integrate it with BizTalk Admin Console is just a click away - simply run BHMSetup.exe. Following are the step by step guidance on installing BHM with the new setup project:

1. Download BizTalk Health Monitor v3.1 from Microsoft Download Center
2. Launch BHMSetup.exe as an administrator, it will open the installation screen as shown below
   
3. Under Options you can:
   • change the installation location of BHM
   • choose to create a shortcut of BHM on the desktop
   • choose to launch BHM after the setup is completed
   • choose to include BizTalk Administration Console in BHM MMC. Note, that this doesn’t replace the existing BizTalk Administration Console. Also, this option is not available in BizTalk 2010.  In order to integrate the BizTalk Admin Console with BHM in BizTalk 2010, see “How to integrate BHM SnapIn” section here.
4. Click on “Start Installing” to begin the installation. You will get a message when installation gets completed. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds.
   
5. Click exit to launch BHM. Notice that now you have BizTalk Administration Console included within BHM MMC.
   

Watch this short video to see how to install BHM with v3.1 and collect an MBV report:

Added View Current Shape of Orchestrations to BHM report 

We have included a script which provides a way to quickly see which shape orchestrations are on without relying on tracking or orchestration debugger. This task relies on the nvcLastAction column in the Instances table which is only available starting BTS2006R2 and is only populated for orchestrations that are either dehydrated, active but dehydratable, or were suspended while dehydratable.  If a certain orchestration does not show up in this list, it does not have any nvcLastAction info associated with it.

Terminate Caching Items (Hard Termination) to maintenance node

The purpose of this task is to handle all cache item cleanup scenarios with one task.  It uses hard termination logic to purge all caching items out of the MsgBox.  This task should clean up cache instances and messages regardless of if they are orphaned, what host they are in, or what state they are in.  More information at https://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcpr/archive/2015/06/29/biztalk-terminator-still-not-cleaning-up-caching-items.aspx.

Improved auto-proposal of maintenance tasks using “From latest BHM report”

Improvements:

• Better logic to pre-fill parameters for the proposed task (whenever possible)
• Show report date when select “From latest BHM report” to indicate which report it is pointing to.
• Fixed issues related to showing the correct task

This post will concentrate on all the new features of BizTalk Health Monitor with v3.

Following is the list of new features included in v3 of BHM. You can click on each feature to read more about its usage:

1. Terminator Integration
2. Store BHM reports in SQL DB
3. Support for custom SQL query
4. Force Full Report Option
5. Enhanced query repository
6. New and Useful BHM homepage 

Terminator Integration

BizTalk Health Monitor now come up with a new node named as “Maintenance” which integrates the Terminator tool.

We have kept the look and feel of the Maintenance node pretty much same as Terminator with few notifications enhancements. You can start with selecting an existing BHM profile for which you want to run any Maintenance task. It is required that all of the following are true before you run any Maintenance task:

Once all is selected you can click on Connect to proceed further.

Once you click on Connect, you can see the Terminator like interface where you can choose any of the available task for execution. There are basically five types of Tasks you can choose from:

1. View (Default)
2. Performance
3. Manage
4. Delete
5. From latest BHM Report

View Tasks - These tasks can be used to query your BizTalk Databases on various counters without making any modifications. List of available View Tasks are:

Performance Tasks – Performance tasks can be used to modify any performance related parameters for your BizTalk Server. List of available Performance Tasks are:

Manage Tasks – These tasks can be used to manage BizTalk DB related operations. Executing these tasks may make modifications to your existing BizTalk DBs. List of available Manage Tasks are:

Delete Tasks – Tasks under this category can be used to resolve BizTalk DB integrity related issues. You need to be very cautious while selecting any of these tasks as selecting and executing wrong task may have adverse effect on your BizTalk DB. To help you choose the right task we have provide complete details of the task under the Description tab. List of available Delete tasks are:

From Latest BHM Report – When you select this task, the Task List drop down will be populated with the list of identified tasks for selected profile that can be resolved by Maintenance engine. The list is captured from the latest BHM report. This is the same option that was previously available for MBV and Terminator integration. You can read more about this option here.

Following screenshot will show you the typical flow of executing a task in Maintenance node, once you are connected:

1. Use this dropdown to view and select a task types from various available tasks types
2. Use this dropdown to view and select a task from various available tasks for selected task types
3. Once you select the task at step#2 Description tab will give you complete details about the selected task
4. You can use Parameters tab to feed in parameters to the task, if required.
5. Once you feed in the parameters, you can click on Execute Task to start Task Execution.
6. Once the task is completed you can view the output of the task under Results tab.
7. Once the task execution is completed you can click on Disconnect to close the Maintenance node.

There are three types of scripts that has been used to write terminator tasks:

1. SQL
2. WMI
3. PowerShell

You can view and download the SQL script from the last row in above screenshot. WMI and PS scripts are not available for download. For getting more details about the tasks we recommend to read this.

Store BHM reports in SQL DB

As in MBV, now you have the ability to store your BHM reports in to a SQL Server DB. This feature could be useful to make some statistics and be able to compare the state of the platform between dates. This is a per profile option and can be enabled by going in to Profile settings as shown below:

Once this option is enabled, BHM will store the reports in mentioned SQL DB. You need to specify the SQL Server name where you want to store the reports, you can also change the name of DB. Following is how the SQL DB would look like:

This process is fast and transparent which is done automatically at the end of each collect if this option is enabled. Please note that we don't store "Queries Output" section of your profile in the DB.

The schema of the database to store these reports is quite simple. Each row of each table represents an entry in the corresponding HTML report and a "Date" column store the date of the report generation. Querying the dashboard table can be very interesting to compare the size of the BizTalk databases at different dates, and then using Reporting services, you can really generate nice reports about the evolution of your BizTalk platform.

Support for custom SQL query

In v2 of BHM we introduced the feature of writing your own custom queries. We are extending that feature to allow writing SQL queries as well. So with v3 you can write your own custom query in following scripts:

• WMI query
• VB Script
• PowerShell query
• Batch file (.bat)
• CMD
• SQL

We would like to reiterate that it is not advisable to query BizTalk DB as it can have adverse effect on the overall Performance of BizTalk Server. We are providing this feature to query your own Custom SQL DB.

Force Full Report Option

We are now providing an easy option to collect a full BHM report. It might happen that your profile settings are not configured to collect a full report and without this option you have to manually change the profile settings to collect full report and reverse the settings again. With this feature you don’t need to do any changes at the Profile level, you can just right click on the profile and select “Force Full Analyze”.

Force Full Analyze will give you two options to select from:

• Include Custom Queries and Rules
• Exclude Custom Queries and Rules

As name suggest you can choose if you want to include your custom queries and rules to be part of the full report or not. During the support call with Microsoft we might ask you to collect a full report for diagnostic purpose and you might not want to expose your custom queries and rules, so you can choose not to include them. 

Enhanced query repository

Query repository is the collection of queries and rules which makes the BHM report so comprehensive. We put constant efforts to improve this repository with all the latest identified issues and product updates and releases. Following are few important addition to the repository:

1. Latest CU check for BizTalk Server 2009 and 2010.
2. Product Life Cycle check
3. SQL Server volume and part size statistics

New and Useful BHM Home Page

We have rejuvenate the BHM home page with important links related to BizTalk Health Monitor and other BizTalk Maintenance related articles which could be very handy while administering the BizTalk Server.

Apart from above all noticeable feature, there are number of changes happened at the engine level to make BHM more stable and to give a better experience. We have also fixed all the known and reported issues of v2.

We hope that these features will help you in maintaining and troubleshooting BizTalk Server related issues.

We would love to hear from you for any feedback or suggestions!

You can either write us at bhmteam@microsoft.com or leave your comment here.

Known issues:

When a user account is specified to schedule a BHM collect, the creation of the task returns the following error: "A specified logon session does not  exist. It may already have been terminated". 

The policy "Do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication" is maybe enabled preventing to create a task under a specific user account.
If it is a local policy and if you can disable it, follow these steps :

- Open the 'Local Security Policies' MMC
- Expand 'Local Policies' and select 'Security Options'
- Disable that property - the system must reboot for the change to take effect



BHM on a localized OS is hanging and crashing when creating a new monitoring profile. 

The root cause was identified and fixed. We will release soon a post V2 update fixing that problem.
Users who want a temporary fix can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).

BHM on a localized OS is displaying an error message when creating the collect scheduled task even if the task is well created.

The root cause was identified and fixed. We will release soon a post V2 update fixing that problem.
Users who want a temporary fix can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).

BHM on a localized OS is not displaying the performance counters in the interactive performance view.

Performance counters are localized and BHM provides only a list of US counters for the moment; they are however pending localization for the main languages.
To workaround that issue, you can add manually these counters in the performance view reusing the ones added on a US server.

When we create a monitoring profile targeting a BizTalk group not accessible by the logged-on user, the  console is crashing.

During the creation of a profile, BHM connects to the Mgmt db of the targeted group to retrieve the list of BizTalk servers of that group - this list will be used in the performance nodes.
This connection attempt made under the interactive logged-on user account is failing because this user does not have rights on the Mgmt Db, and this error is not well catched.
We will release soon a post V2 update allowing to specify the user account in the new profile dialogbox and managing better connection errors.

You should be able workaround that issue by editing manually an XML profile file following the steps below  :

- Duplicate an existing profile using the new "duplicate profile" menu item

- open a CMD window under elevated admin priviledge

- in this cmd change the folder to "c:\programdata\Microsoft\BizTalk Health Monitor"

- open in notepad the XML file corresponding to this duplicated profile

- modify in this xml file the value of MGMTDBSERVER and MGMTDBNAME properties to specify the location of the new Mgmt db you want to target

- modify the value of the "DEFAULTBTS" property entering the name of one BizTalk server of that new targeted group

- modify the value of the "ALLBTS" property entering this same BizTalk server or the complete list of all your BTS of the new targeted group, ex : Value="BTSRV1:True:True:True, BTSRV2:False:False:True"

- save the xml file

- Open BHM console : you should see then the new profile listed

- Display the Settings dialogbox of the new profile and specify the user to run the collect as

There is no SSL usage option in the mail notifications settings

An option to use SSL will be added in the next public version of BHM; in the meantime users who want a temporary build implementing that option can contact JP (jpierauc@microsoft.com).

Error when creating a scheduled analyze task if the username or password contains some special chars like '&'

This issue is fixed in the next version which will be available very soon.
To workaround that issue, you can avoid specifying the user name and password when enabling the task in BHM, and then edit manually the created BHM task in the Task Scheduler application to run the task under a specific user account.