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Microsoft Integration Newsletter – September 2016, Issue 24

EnkayTech was mentioned in Microsoft’s Integration Newsletter. Here’s the extract from the newsletter.

Monitoring on premise BizTalk applications using cloud based Power BI SaaS
In this session, Jaidev Kunjur demonstrated how they implemented a BizTalk application monitoring solution using Azure cloud based Power BI and multiple on premise data sources. The goal was to quickly build an easy to use monitoring solution for the Network Operations Center team (that didn’t know BizTalk) but also provide more visibility into business processes so that Production support staff (who knew BizTalk) could use this as an additional tool to track and debug performance issues. The Power BI dashboard was also used to provide daily reports to business and IT so they could see the KPIs and the value provided by BizTalk that was being used as an enterprise service bus for processing claims, billing, and policies. You can watch the video of the session here.

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Cloud based EDI on Microsoft Azure using Enterprise Integration Pack (EIP)

With Azure and Logic Apps, we can now implement “serverless”, cloud-based business-to-business (B2B) communication, without the need for BizTalk Server or SQL Server. We can quickly and reliably process business transactions, easily track and troubleshoot B2B events and leverage more out-of-the-box connectors. Some key features include:

  • Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities on Azure: The integration accounts within EIP quickly creates and manages cloud based B2B related artifacts such as maps, schemas, trading partners, agreements and certificates. We can send, receive and troubleshoot B2B transactions across a wide variety of protocols including AS2, EDIFACT and X12.
  • Management capabilities: We can track B2B events in a number of flexible ways like built-in tracking which can be routed to Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) using the out-of-the-box tracking portal. We can easily view and troubleshoot B2B transactions over AS2 and X12 formats (with EDIFACT too).
  • Enterprise connectors: With Logic Apps, we can use pre-built enterprise connectors that make it simple and faster to establish connections with business applications. There are several connectors we can use, for example, MQ Series and SAP ECC connectors. For a full list of all our connectors, please visit the Logic Apps connectors reference.
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Power BI Dashboards

We recently built Power BI Dashboards hosted in the Cloud for surfacing BizTalk BAM aggregates that are tracking near real-time performance metrics. The Dashboard will be used by the customer to monitor BizTalk application performance for all integrations flowing through the Enterprise Service Bus. For example, we track durations for each integration, message sizes, etc., so that the Network Operations Center (NOC) can quickly review the health of the system when issues are reported. For example, when end users complain that the response times are very poor etc., the NOC can go to the Power BI BAM Dashboard and quickly review historical charts to identify potential root causes and then contact the BizTalk DevOps team to look into a specific application that may not be meeting SLAs. We’re also building alerts so that, for example, if we detect a particular integration is performing poorly, or if messages sizes are larger than expected etc., or percentage change in the number of messages received is greater than or less than expected, we send a notification to the NOC. We’re also able to use Power Query to quickly search for a particular transaction, and can either display it in tabular form, or create a chart as part of the query.

Below are some sample screen shots showing how we’ve used Power Query, Power Maps, and Power View to display BAM aggregates.