Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Raul Camacho, SOA Solution Architect from Microsoft, did a talk about BAM to implement a service and SLA monitoring solution. Session is focused to IT pro to monitor BizTalk. Service Analytics use BAM, WCF and so on. What is Service Analytics. Why Services Analytics? For this is new (terminology) and concept. Slogan: one manages what one measures. This is to provide answers to the business around availability, performance, consumption and profitability. So it can help to identify dependencies. Approach of speaker (Microsoft) to real world scenario’s were, see slide below. To create observation model one can use Excel (Bam add-in after installation/configuration of BizTalk). With Bam API, event stream, one can send data into database (BAM Database). Once in database one can do whatever it wants (cubes, reporting and so on). Than Raul gave a demo at least he tried, but mouse did not work (so no demo yet). So he went to talk about challenges one can face. Mouse is wor...

BizTalk Server Team has released  a new whitepaper authored by Jesus Rodriguez and Joe Klug from Microsoft’s partner Tellago. It provides also code samples targeted at developers who are developing BAM solutions. The whitepaper titled “Business Activity Monitoring in Depth for Developers” covers the following topics: Business Activity Monitoring Overview – including the BAM observation model and how to define it Using BAM to instrument events from applications – programmatically and declaratively An overview and detailed description of the BAM infrastructure Retrieving BAM data through various BI tools Extending the BAM API with a RESTful services Full word document and samples can be downloaded . Good job by these guys and reviewers :) Technorati: BizTalk 2006 R2 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring

Microsoft recently added a training kit for Business Activity Monitoring. I downloaded the kit and installed it on my BizTalk 2006 R2. This kit kit contains an overview of the BAM feature ("BAM Training.doc"), a BAM solution sample ("BAM Training_Hands-On Exercises.doc"), sample code files to use with the sample solution ("BAM Training_Lab Files" folder), and a PowerPoint slide deck to use in an instructor-led setting ("BAM Training_Instructor Slide Deck.ppt"). Before running the kit I checked if BAM was properly configured in this environment, which was not the case. After I configured BAM I ran the executable, which contains a sample called ‘OrderProcess’ solution and msi. I imported this msi file inside BizTalk Administration console. The solution contains one orchestration visualized below. After running msi I fired up BAM portal to check if everything is working properly, which was the case. I then deployed BAM definition file (saving Order...