The BHM team collected a lot of feedback from BHM users to enrich the tool with new features while at the same time making it more reliable to provide a better experience.
Version 3 brings many great new features and one major one:  the integration of the famous Terminator application making BHM a complete BizTalk maintenance solution – checking the health of any BizTalk platform and providing remediation capabilities.  The entire remediation power of Terminator is now included in BHM!

The BizTalk Health Monitor MMC snap-in shares the same analysis and repository engine as MBV application and has been available since June 2014 with the release of BizTalk Server 2013 R2.  Since then, it has been continuously updated with new features to provide more flexibility and power to BizTalk administrators in their monitoring and maintenance tasks.
As mentioned in my previous post, there will be no further public updates of MBV, as BHM is now the recommended free solution for a BizTalk group health check.

Click here for more details on the V3 release

BHM gives you a powerful and customizable dashboard to monitor the health of your BizTalk group and can be enriched with custom queries (SQL, WMI, PS, etc..) and custom rules.  It can be added to the existing BizTalk Administration Console or run individually to provide the following features:

    • Customizable dashboard displaying overall health of BizTalk environment
    • Generate and view MBV reports
    • Run Terminator tasks for maintenance
    • Create custom queries
    • Send email notifications
    • Schedule report collection
    • Perfmon integration with preloaded scenario-based counters
    • Monitor multiple BizTalk Environments
    • Store reports in SQL

v3 Release:
    • Added Terminator integration
    • Added custom SQL query support
    • Added SQL store for reports
    • Added force full report option
    • Updated query repository

v2 Release:
    • Added customizable dashboard
    • Added custom query support
    • Added custom rules support
    • Profile enhancements

v1 Release:
    • Initial release

You are maybe already aware of our new Health Check tool "BizTalk Health Monitor" (aka " BHM") available now in its version 2. If not, I invite you strongly to download it and use it to check periodically for the good health of your BizTalk production platforms.

BHM is a full MMC snap-in sharing the same engine and repository (queries and rules) than MBV to analyze in-depth a  BizTalk group and present all important information in a complete dashboard view.
This MMC was created to replace definitively MBV by presenting in a more user friendly format its analyze results and providing so a better experience.
Its snap-in format allows to be easely integrated in an existing MMC like the BizTalk Administration console, and its TreeView control allows to keep well organized its multiple profiles and generated reports, making much more easy their comparison.
BHM provides also schedule & notification features, integrated perfomance counters views, and its latest version is now completly customizable; you can so customize as you want its dashboard view and add very easely your own queries and rules !

I inform you so that no updated public version of MBV will be available. Next updates of the rich repository of MBV (its large set of queries and rules raising warnings)  will be available only via BHM which will be periodicallly updated.

I encourage you to test BHM and its numerous features and report your feedbacks on the BHM blog

FYI, BHM v3 is in preparation and should provide remediation features 

Thanks

JP

I'm pleased to inform you that BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM) v2 is now available for download on the  Microsoft Download Link Center : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43716

The BHM team improved drastically this MMC snap-in to make it more reliable and very customizable.
In this new version you will be able so to customize completly the dasboard view by creating your own tiles to display custom warnings, specific summary reports entries, or even queries output.
You will be also able to add quickly custom queries and rules. These features were expected by lot of BHM users to provide more flexibility in this health check console and to use it as a centralized health application. 

In BHM v2, you can so complete easily the query repository of BHM adding  your custom queries executing WMI, .VBS, PowerShell, .CMD or .BAT scripts.
These queries will be stored per group node (renamed "profile" node in BHM v2).

You can also create your own rules in addition to the native BHM rules, using a declarative method to define your own conditions and triggered actions.
These custom rules can target existing native BHM queries but also your own custom queries of course.
These custom rules will also be stored per profile node.

The BHM team will continue to update periodically this MMC Snapin, adding new features of course but also completing its repository of queries and rules to be sure its output remains always pertinent in term of health check and meet the BizTalk administrators expectations.

We will create a post in BHM blog containing a Q&A and listing some known issues met with BHM and you wil be able to report your comments and questions.

You can visit the BHM blog for all details about this new version and its new features  : https://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkhealthmonitor/archive/2014/11/24/biztalk-health-monitor-v2-released.aspx

Thanks

JP

I'm pleased to inform you that BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM) v2 is finished and will be available very soon on the  Microsoft Download Link Center.

The BHM team improved drastically this MMC snap-in to make it more reliable and very customizable.
In this new version you will be able so to customize completly the dasboard views by creating your own tiles to display custom warnings, specific summary reports entries, or even queries output.
You will be also able to add quickly custom queries and rules.
These features were expected by lot of BHM users to provide more flexibility in this health check console and to use it as a centralized health application. 

In BHM v2, you can so complete easily the query repository of BHM adding  your custom queries executing WMI, .VBS, PowerShell, .CMD or .BAT scripts.
These queries will be stored per group node (renamed "profile" node in BHM v2).

You can also create your own rules in addition to the native BHM rules, using a declarative method to define your own conditions and triggered actions.
These custom rules can target existing native BHM queries but also your own custom queries of course.
These custom rules will also be stored per profile node.

Stay tuned so, BHM availability will be announced on the BHM blog but also on my MBV one.



Thanks !

JP

As mentioned in my previous post, I inform you that a new BizTalk Health application named "BizTalk Health Monitor" is now available in BizTalk 2013 R2
After releasing MBV as a standalone tool for several years,  the MBV project team decided indeed to integrate it more closely with the BizTalk Administration Console to provide BizTalk administrators  a quick and complete dashboard of a BizTalk group which will help them monitor the health of their BizTalk platform.

A new BizTalk snap-in, named “BizTalk Health Monitor” (aka “BHM”), has so been created to help you easily monitor the health of your BizTalk environment.
BHM is based on the same engine as MBV and can be added to the existing BizTalk Administration Console or can be run individually in its own MMC window.

The first version of BHM is included in BizTalk 2013 R2 in the “Support tools” folder but updates will be released periodically with new features (and fixes if needed). The first update is almost ready and should be available soon.

Note that BHM will work also with previous versions of BizTalk targeting any versions of BizTalk groups since BizTalk 2004 ;-) 

A dedicated blog was specifically created by the BHM team to provide all details about this new BizTalk health check application, how to install it in its own MMC or in the existing BizTalk console (prefered method) and how to use it, so instead to write here a long post about it, I let you read the posts below about BHM.

Feel free to let your comments on the BHM blog.

Thanks

JP

Overview of BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM)
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkhealthmonitor/archive/2014/06/26/overview-of-biztalk-health-monitor-bhm.aspx

Getting started with BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM)
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkhealthmonitor/archive/2014/06/26/getting-started-with-biztalk-health-monitor-bhm.aspx

BizTalk 2013 R2 should be available this month.

Even if this new BizTalk version is not a major one with really new core features, MBV had to be updated to be able to first detect a BizTalk 2013 R2 group, and second to check that the OS and SQL versions of a BizTalk 2013 R2 group are correct and so well supported.

I had also to change some existing queries and rules related to BizTalk Cumulative Updates which assumed a BizTalk 2013 group instead of a 2013 R2 one.

This new version is available for download as usual on my blog at the same location :

https://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2007/12/18/msgboxviewer.aspx

I will go more in depth in a next post about the integration of MBV with BizTalk 2013 R2 with some details about the new "BizTalk Health Monitor" MMC snap-in soon available.
so stay tuned...

Thanks

JP Auconie

sorry for my silence, I recognized I have not updated MBV for a long time.

In fact I update it frequently for our internal usage at Microsoft or for some specific customers scenarios that I meet  during my visits on customer sites, but I did not take the time until now to fix some remaining issues and publish it for public usage.

It is the good time so to publish a new build.

New features:

As for each new version of MBV, this version brings new queries and updated some existing rules to check for latest CUs of BizTalk for example

It provides also now the possibility to compress in a zip the output report and send it automatically by mail if needed (Cf my last post on version 13.662 for more details on this mail notification feature:

https://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2013/10/28/msgboxviewer-13-662-is-released-and-provides-great-new-features.aspx)

The Dashboard section was also improved with additional information reported and provides now a complete view of all the important information of your BizTalk group.

Finally, the main window of MBV (in its UI version so) can now be resized  to any size you want to adapt to any resolution of your analyzed  server.

You can downbload this latest version here :

https://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2007/12/18/msgboxviewer.aspx

Feel free to contact me if you meet some issues or have any questions regarding that version or MBV usage in general

JP

I'm happy to make public the latest version of MsgBoxViewer which provides lot of great new features that I detail below.

For those who don’t  dont know yet the tool, MsgBoxViewer (aka ”MBV”) is a known tool to do a complete analysis of a BizTalk group, whether it is in Production or not and supporting all versions of BizTalk since BizTalk Server 2004.
The tool is generating friendly HTML reports containing lot of information about a BizTalk group but also raising non-critical and critical warnings.

Key points of MBV :
 

• Provided  in BizTalk 2013 and each next CU.
• Support all BizTalk versions since BizTalk 2004
• Safe to run in Production
• No setup, just copy and run
• Embeds hundreds of queries and rules coming from PG, CSS  and the Field
• Frequently used by both customers and MS engineers (CSS, MCS, PFE) to check for the good health and integrity of a BizTalk group, and to retrieve a complete topology of the BizTalk Platform
• Used by BizTalk PFEs to deliver Health Checks
• Checks the integrity of BizTalk Databases and propose immediate remediation tasks to famous “Terminator” tool  (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2846) 
• Provided as both a GUI and a console application. The console  version is used more  and more as a custom monitoring tool to be scheduled as a task , generating  periodically HTML reports but also sending periodically raised warnings in the
  App journal, and the warnings and dashboard in emails. It can so complement  ideally SCOM and the BizTalk Mgmt Pack to provide a complete monitoring of a Production BizTalk platform

New Topology Diagram :

MBV is drawing now a topology driagram if you choose to generate the Topology Report.
This diagram is quite basic in its first version  but  makes easier the understanding of the topology.it will be richer in the futur versions.
The idea is to represent graphically the topology of the BizTalk group analyzed and present the BizTalk Servers  and the SQL Servers hosting the BizTalk databases , but also the servers source or destination of messages.
Each BTS or SQL server in the diagram provides a hyper link to display the details of the server.


Dashboard and Warnings report can now be sent automatically by mail after a collect

This feature was demanded by many users who wanted a periodic monitoring solution of their BizTalk Platform and be auto-alerted of warnings detected.
MBV, in its GUI versions, provides so a profile option to enable that feature and additional options to configure a SMTP server, port, user, pwd, subject, recipients,etc.. .
All these options are saved in an MBV profile so you can configure different values depending of the selected profile.

Once enabled, that feature will automatically send by mail to the recipient(s) of your choice the Dashboard and the Warnings report.You do not have anymore so use a third party solution to send MBV reports by mail.
The subject of the mail will inform if critical warnings were detected (thanks to Stephane Aubonnet, one of my customers I'm working with, for that suggestion).
To keep sending small mails, the full MBV report is not attached to the mail knowing that the dashboard and warnings reports are enough to have a good quick view on the health of the Platform; Maybe in a next version I will provide an extra option to attach it.

MBV GUI version provides some additional global settings

MBV provides two more options to allow disabling the dialogbox displayed at the end of a collect and disabling the automatic open of the generated HTML report.

Note: These options are saved in the registry and so are independant of MBV profiles.

Header, Dashboard, and Summary/Warnings can now be saved into a SQL Database

I found useful the possibility to store into a SQL database each main sections of an MBV report to be able then to make some statistics and be ble to compare the state of the platform between dates.

MBV provides so, still in an MBV profile, a such option.
Once this option enabled, MBV at the end of a collect will store in a SQL Db of your choice and on a SQL Server of your choice the Header report, the Summary Report, the Warnings report, and finally the Dashboard report.
This process is fast, transparent for you and done automatically at the end of each collect if the MBV profile used enable that feature of course.

The schema of the database to store these reports is quite simple and creates only 4 tables, one for each report to be saved.
Each row of each table represents an entry in the corresponding HTML report and a "Date" column store the date of the report generation.
You can so make simple queries to extract information about a report generated at a specific date for example.
Querying the dasboard table can be so very interesting to compare the size of the BizTlak databases at different dates, and then using Reporting services, you can really generate nice reports about the evolution of your BizTlak platorm.

MBV GUI can reload existing Header, Dashboard, and Summary/Warnings from a SQL database

MBV, in its GUI version, provides the possibility to re-load from the MBV SQL database the main reports of an existing collect.
The main tab "Reports" provides at the bottom a combobox which will list all the dates of the reports found in the MBV store SQL database.
Selecting a date in the combobox will re-load so the reports and display them in the corresponding tabs of MBV.

Note: The SQL server and SQL database used to search for these dates and reports are saved in the registry and are independant of the MBV profiles.

You can download this new version here:

https://blogs.technet.com/b/jpierauc/archive/2007/12/18/msgboxviewer.aspx

 

I think really that these additional features can help you implementing a complete monitoring solution of your BizTalk platforrm, complementing SCOM  and its BizTalk Mgmt Pack,  and reduce so the risks to have critcal issues raised .
Furthermore, the possibility to store in SQL Db the important sections of each MBV reports collected will help you to follow the evolution of your BizTalk Platform.

As usual, feel free to report me your comments  & issues about the tool and any suggestions are welcome if they are useful for the all the BizTalk community

Thanks !

JP

When  I discuss about MBV with my customers, I notice that they are very interested by the possibility to customize MBV so I would like to start a set of posts around the MBV customization.

In that post, I will talk first about MBV options and the notion of Profiles :

MBV options

MBV, in the "Global properties" tab (renamed '"Options" tab in the upcoming build 13.30) of its UI version,  provides a list of global options that you can  modify to change some MBV settings.

Some of these options are common to the custom Health Check framework that MBV is using, like the "SQL , WMI, or VBS Timeout", "Report Title" ,etc..and others are specific to the Repository currently loaded.

Remember that MBV is somewhere a generic Health Check application  loading a product repository (BizTalk in the case of MBV) containing some queries and rules to process, and using a common Health Check Framework (running the queries and processing the rules).

The options specific to the BizTalk repository are for example "BizTalk Mgmt DB server", "BizTalk Mgmt DB Name", or the option "Log Msg Flow Report".


This is a list of available MBV options as they appear in the UI version of MBV :

Some of these global options allow to customize the output of the MBV report :

- Log Query Reports

- Log Topology Report

- Log Summary Report

- Log Dashboard Report

These options allow indeed to include or not some reports in the MBV output files.

By default they will be all included but you can for example decide to not include the Topology Report in the output files (because you have it already) .

You can also decide to not include the result of the queries executed and keep only the Warnings, Summary, and Dashboard Report so you can disable the query report generation.

You can even keep only the Warnings and Dashboard reports.


This customization allows you to generate more compact output files which will be more easy then to analyze. 

MBV Profiles

MBV has a notion of profile than you can load to reuse a set of options and queries.

All the MBV options described above, the selected  queries, the custom query properties, the selected rules and any created custom rules are saved in the current loaded profile when exiting MBV.

A profile is physically saved in a file named "MBVSettings_<profilename>.xml ".

You can see quickly the available profiles in the combobox "Current Profile" in the right pane of MBV UI :

A

- That Profile combobox contains the default profile, some predefined profiles '"Minimum" and "Full", and also the available custom profiles :

The "Default" profile is managed physically by the file MBVSettings.xml and is the profile loaded when MBV is started.Any change in that profile will be reflected at the next MBV Startup.

When selected, the Minimum profile selects only the queries of the "Important" category  and the Full profile selects ALL the queries of all query categories. These predefined profiles provides so a quick way to do a quick collect or a complete one.

The created custom profiles available in the MBV current folder will appear then in the combobox.


- The button "Save As" allows to save the current profile under a new named  profile.

You can so define your own custom profile selecting the queries you need, definining your own values fore some query properties, and even creating your own rules, and then save this selection in a custom profile than you can reload after.


- A custom profile or a predefined one can be selected quickly via the combobox in UI version of MBV but can also be used with the Console version of MBV using the "-PROFILE:" parameter :

Ex:

"MBVConsole -PROFILE:MBVSettings_DailyCheck"

"MBVConsole -PROFILE:MINI"

"MBVConsole -PROFILE:FULL"

Profile and Header report

The header section of a report generated by MBV will contain the name of the profile used for the collect  :

Profile scenario sample 

A good example of profiles usage is if you decide to Schedule MBV periodically (daily, weekly,etc...).

If you want to schedule MBV every day morning and evening for example, you can use the Windows Scheduler to start periodically MBVConsole.exe using a specific custom profile to load.

In that case, when entering the program to start in the Action of the Scheduled MBV task, you can specify in the "Add Arguments" field the profile to load  :

Ex:

  -PROFILE:MINI

or

- PROFILE:MBVSettings_MyProfile 

 Summary

Both MBV UI and Console versions are sharing a same Health Check framework that provies a profile mecanism to reuse a set of settings.

An MBV profile is just a settings file keeping all the global options of MBV, a set of selected queries and rules, custom query properties and custom rules.

MBV UI allows to change the global options and select the queries and rules to execute and allows to save such selection in a reusable profile, and both MBV UI and MBV Console can then load either the default profile, a predefined profile (Mini or Full), or any custom profile.

I hope really that this post will push you to play with MBV options and profiles to customize MBV according to your own needs.

In a next  post, I will talk more about some specific global options wihch are intresting to change in some specific scenarios.

Thanks

JP 

I continued  to work on MBV since its recent version 13, improving its UI and updating again its repository (queries and rules).

I also fixed some issues that were reported to me and I added some interesting features :

1) MBV provides now a new section named "Dashboard report".
This section contains in fact all indicators considered as critical for the good health of a BizTalk group  and will allow you to have a very quick view of the state of your BizTalk System.
This view was missing from my experience spent with some BT admins; indeed, the existing “Summary Report” section contains already lot of important information but we don’t know obviously what is crucial to monitor among that volume of information  and what is reflecting the good health of a BT System.
 This Dashboard section takes so only some important entries of the Summary Report  and isolate them in a specific section.
Idealy I would appreciate to have also a such view in one tab of the Hub  page of the BizTalk console, showing quickly the number of total messages in all MsgBox queues, the used space of the BizTalk databases, the state of the jobs,etc... ;-)

This is a sample view of that section :

Dashboard Report   

2) I also changed a little bit the size and orientation of the frames of the generated HTML files to clarify again the output.

 This is a sample of the new output :

 3) I  added finally the possibility to change more quickly the current profile in both UI and console version of MBV and added some two predefined profiles "Minimum" and "Full".

I recall that  a profile stores the selected queries, the query custom properties, and all the MBV global options, and each profile is stored in a file prefixed by "MBVSettings_".
At MBV UI startup a combobox is populated by all the profile files enumerated in the current MBV folder. 
You can  so select in one click your current profile in the combobox visible on the main page of MBV UI (or as argument in MBVConsole), and also select the predefined "Minimum" or "Full" profile.
Selecting the Minimum profile will select only the queries of the "Important" category as opposed the Full profile selecting all the queries of all the categories.

This quick selection of a predefined profile is mush faster than checking/unchecking manually the queries in each category.

 
 
This version of MBV is available as an attachment in that post.

I look forward to have your feedbacks on that version and you can contact me of course if you want to report issue or suggestions.

in next posts I will discuss more about the global options of MBV to cutomize the report according to your own needs .
You have indeed the possibility to keep only the sections you are interested by, just by changing some global options. Stay tuned so !
 

Thanks !

JP

MsgBoxViewer1320.zip