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Managing Suspended Documents
Documents will suspend in BizTalk for any number of reasons (Parsing, Transmitting, Validation, etc.).
Of the ones that have suspended:
- Which ones should be focused on first?
- How can I reduce the amount of staff time dedicated to dealing with these suspended items?
» Navigate to Suspended Document Manager
You are provided with information on:
- Total Number of Documents in your Suspended Queue
- Number of Suspended Documents that are being automatically managed by AppMetrics
- Number or Suspended Documents that are currently being either deleted or resubmitted
- Total remaining number of Suspended Documents that are available for managing
In the above example there are 467 documents that have suspended. Which ones do I care about most?
» Select Categories from the left hand navigation bar
You are presented with four views of the same Suspended Queue. (The default "Items available for managing" view is shown.
There is a view by:
- Trading Partner
- Document Type
- Channel
- Suspended State
You can now 'cut and dice' the Suspended Queue by each of the four perspectives. Suppose you focus initially on Document Type "OrderProcessing_(319)".
» Simply click the Legend item.
All Documents of Type "OrderProcessing_WireTxRequest" are now broken down by Trading Partner.
» Select which Trading Partner you wish to focus on, in this case "Exhaust Supplies"
All Documents of Type "OrderProcessing_WireTxRequest" by Trading Partner "Exhaust Supplies are available for Manual management.
» Select Preview. This presents a list of the set you have 'narrowed-in' on.
» Click on the Trading Partner name hyper-link to view the specific documents.
These 162 documents can now be either deleted or resubmitted.
In this example the 162 documents will be resubmitted. This will show up in the Summary Status.
Proactive Monitoring
Oftentimes events can occur in your applications that are not immediately evident from the application perspective (e.g. 'n' number of business processes running concurrently), but if left unchecked can cumulate to disastrous effect.
This scenario identifies how an alert can be configured to trigger when a Schedule is taking too long to complete. There are other ways to determine Alert trigger points for a variety of other incidents. Please call Xtremesoft for details.
The Accounting Department noticed that the processing of a specific Purchase Order took longer than normal.
» First we retrieve the Purchase Order from the BizTalk Document Tracking Database.
» Navigate to the Business Process Manager and construct a query to retrieve the document of series of documents of interest.
The result set is returned.
» Click on the hyperlink in the first column.We can pull up the document and in addition any Schedule data that had been involved in the processing of the document.
We are able to see the 'trace route' of the document through the business process. We notice that in the OrderProcessing_OrderApproval Schedule, that Action 'Acknowledge_WireXfer3' (Highlighted) took over 10 minutes to complete. In most cases we would expect this to take no longer than 1 or 2 minutes.
We therefore need to configure an Alert such that if ever this specific Action takes longer than (say) 2 minutes, we want to be informed at run time by e-mail.
» Add 'Schedule waiting too long' Alert.
» Select Action type 'Acknowledge_WireXfer3' and select a threshold (e.g. two minutes)
» Select delivery method and 'Save Alert'
Whenever this Schedule runs and the Action 'Acknowledge_WireXfer3' takes longer than two minutes an email will be dispatched to an audience with incident related content.
Other Available Alerts
- Schedule waiting too long - As shown above
- Schedule count too high - Determine maximum number of Schedules that can run concurrently on same server
- Schedule failed - Notifies when a schedule fails
- Suspended document - Can notify on each specific Suspended Document incident
- Suspended queue too deep - Determine a Suspended documents threshold, after which you will be sent an hourly update with > threshold number.
- Server unavailable - Can be informed should a server crash or is rebooted.
- Receive function disabled - You can be notified should a receive function become disabled.
Trading Partner (TP) Performance
Your application is only available if your trading partners who you exchange documents with are available also. A trading partner that is offline will disrupt the business flow between your organization and theirs, and in BizTalk terms this results in Suspended Documents of type Transmitting Error. For as long as a trading partner is down business is being jeopardized.
AppMetrics for BizTalk Severs manages Transmitting Error incidences automatically, thus avoiding precious resources spent on investigating the causes of document suspensions, repeatedly determining whether the trading partner is back online and then resubmitting the outstanding Suspended Documents.
Further AppMetrics records these incidences so it is possible to determine how often these events occur, for how long and what number of documents were suspended (and later resubmitted) as a result of this downtime. You can determine whether your trading partners are improving or deteriorating over time. This information can be used to define service level commitments.
To determine whether any of your trading partners are currently unavailable.
Note: To take advantage of this feature you must have Rapid Response installed with AppMetrics for BizTalk Server.
» Navigate to Suspended Document Manager.
An orange slice in the pie indicates that documents are suspending due to transmitting errors.
The Suspended Queue has 382 Documents that are suspended in total. Of these there are 24 documents which are being automatically managed. This means that there are 24 Suspended Documents of type Transmitting Error.
» So to find out which trading partners are causing these document suspensions, navigate to 'Automated Status'.
We can now see which trading partners are unavailable (host status equals "No Response") and the number of documents that are so far affected by their servers being down.
AppMetrics will monitor these trading partners and as each recovers will instruct BizTalk to resubmit the affected documents.
As each trading partner revives AppMetrics reflects the status. In the above case AppMetrics shows that Carburetor Inc is currently up and AppMetrics is resubmitting the outstanding documents, while two remaining trading partners are still unavailable.
By navigating to 'Status', AppMetrics can keep you current on the automatic handling of the suspended queue. As trading partners come back online the incidences of automatic handling steadily reduce and the orange slice gets progressively slimmer.
This entire process was handled automatically, with no expensive technical resources spent waiting for trading partners to come back online and then attempting a manual document resubmission.
This process was also logged.
» Navigate to 'Automated History' and select the time duration you are interested in reviewing.
This view provides a summary of all document suspension that occurred by trading partner within the period specified.
By selecting different windows (say month by month or week by week), it is possible to see whether a trading partner is improving or deteriorating.
» For more detail on a specific trading partner, simply click on their name.
Now you can find out how long a Trading Partner was down, the incidences of down and up time as well as the number of documents managed successfully or otherwise.
This information can be used to formulate trading partner performance level agreements
Production Monitoring
Now that you have deployed your distributed BizTalk Server application, you need to monitor its performance. Some questions you may have include:
- Are any of the machines running my BizTalk application over or underutilized?
- Is the application performance evenly distributed?
- Am I able to define, enforce or conform to Service Level Agreements?
- Can I scale my environment based on future business projections?
These questions can be answered by AppMetrics for BizTalk Server.
» Navigate to the Metrics tab.
You are presented with a high level view of your BizTalk Server application environment. From here you can see the number of BizTalk servers being monitored, their specific functions (IIS, Messaging or Orchestration), and the status of the Agents monitoring each of the BizTalk Servers.
On the left navigation bar you are presented with a variety of Application performance metrics, viewable by clicking on the relevant node.
» Select a node.
Once a node is selected a series of line charts are presented that provide Application performance information related to the area of interest. The default period is the last 24 hours, but reporting periods are configurable by the user.
Hover text is also available by 'mouse over-ing' the line charts themselves.
Let's say you are specifically interested in how a particular Application Schedule is performing. You are concerned that because you do not know how long a given Schedule takes to complete in Production, you are unable to commit to a Service Level Agreement relating to Application performance.
To address this issue:
» Navigate to the Orchestration Duration Mode.
The first chart presented provides information on the performance of 'All Schedules'. The next provides information on a specific schedule, though not the one you are interested in.
All Schedules are available for performance monitoring and you need to select the appropriate schedule from the pull down list.
» Select 'OrderProcessing_Order Approval'.
By selecting this Schedule incidence from the pulled down list you are able to see performance information, over the time period selected. This is useful as you can now see the duration of this particular Schedule over all servers that have been running it.
» Click on the line chart itself.
You will see this same Schedule, but this time you will see performance of this Schedule on each specific server. In this case the load is evenly distributed on each of the servers it has been running on.
You now know that this Schedule, over the period monitored has not exceeded 200,000 seconds (2.3 days appx), which can form the basis of a Service Level Agreement commitment.
In addition to providing historical information on this Schedule's performance; AppMetrics also provides Alerting, such that, if this Schedule exceeded this duration, a notification could be dispatched immediately at run time.
Finally, you want to see the memory utilization of each of X-LANG host, as this may have some bearing on future performance of this Schedule.
» Click on the memory chart.
You can see that over this same time period Memory usage has steadily increased, and that Server DEMO-VM3 looks to be narrowly ahead in terms of needing an upgrade. If your use of Orchestration is going to double over the next 3 months, this may be an issue.
In the above example the following questions have all been addressed:
- Can I report on each of my BizTalk Services (IIS, Messaging and Orchestrations)?
- Can I identify information that will serve to define, enforce of conform to Service Level Agreements?
- Can I monitor my BizTalk machines to see if any are over or under utilized?
- Can I monitor my BizTalk machines to make sure that my Application load is evenly distributed?
- Can I monitor performance threatening events?
Business Process Tracking
An important document is 'lost' in your BizTalk Application - you know it was being managed by a Schedule, but you're missing vital information needed to locate, diagnose and correct the situation. You need to know:
- its current status
- if an error occurred, at what point in the Schedule it happened
- is the schedule that's managing the document is hung
The Business Process Manager is a tool that enables you to not only find and retrieve documents, but also identify the specific document's history through the Business Process (Schedule) that managed it.
This can identify:
- Documents being managed by a Schedule that repeatedly hang
- Documents that are waiting for an Action yet to occur
- Duration information that can be configured into future Alert threshold settings
- Information for Schedule Actions to formulate Service Level Agreements
» Navigate to the Business Process Manager.
Here you can define a date range and construct a simple yet powerful query to retrieve a specific document or series of documents.
The documents that satisfy your query criteria are returned.
» Click on the hyperlink in the first column.
A new screen pops up.
This illustrates the document and Schedule details.
The top half of the page contains information related to the specific document. The lower half of the page contains information on the Schedule (in this case OrderProcessing_ValidateClient' Schedule) that managed this document.
From here you can see not only how many Actions were involved in this process but how long each Action took to complete.
Each of these Action durations can be Alerted on. If an Action takes longer than a specific duration, a user can be immediately informed at run time of this event.
Also by examining several other documents that have been managed by this Schedule »(by clicking 'Next' in the UI) it becomes relatively easy to observe the 'actual' performance of your Application, and thus enable you to define (or conform to) Service Level Agreements.
» Click successive Actions within the Schedule.
The History section is refreshed with context sensitive information related to that Action.
Seen here with Receive Order.
And here with Validate Client.
Should a document be retrieved that is being managed by a running Schedule (not shown in this example), it could be either 'Suspended' or 'Terminated' if desired, from within this UI as well.
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