Instrumentation Best Practices for High Performance BizTalk Solutions

Published: November 2010

Author: Valery Mizonov, Microsoft Corporation

Reviewed By:

• Mark Simms, Microsoft Corporation

• Jayanthi Sampathkumar, Microsoft Corporation

• Krish Srinivasan, Microsoft Corporation

  Applies To: Microsoft BizTalk Server

  Summary: The traditional ways of instrumenting BizTalk solutions may not always be the most effective from a performance standpoint. The commonly used instrumentation and tracing components leveraging the Win32 Debugging APIs may introduce a potential bottleneck and become responsible for performance degradations in multi-threaded BizTalk applications running under stress.

  From the other side, source code instrumentation delivers a great degree of visibility into the application behavior and helps reduce the overall troubleshooting efforts. Consequently, a fundamentally new approach to instrumenting high performance BizTalk solutions has become crucially important to enable collecting the rich and detailed diagnostic information in a non-intrusive manner with virtually no overhead and no impact on the application performance.

  The Windows Server AppFabric Customer Advisory Team at Microsoft aimed to provide the community with validated best practices to help BizTalk developers enrich their solutions with the high-performance instrumentation internally adopted by many Microsoft products. These best practices have been reflected in the form of a reusable framework which BizTalk developers can easily plug in and adopt in their own implementations.