When I ran analyze on BizTalk Health Monitor, it showed up some warnings:

Tracking events for all Orchs:
If Orchestrations are complex and numerous, it can seriously impact performance and cause quick
DTA DB increase

"Start and End Shapes" tracking events for some Orchestrations
Not recommended in Production groups as they can impact performances.

When I checked tracking properties of our Orchestrations, under 'track events', all the 3 options were checked:   'Message start and end', 'Message Send and Recieve', 'Shape start and end'   

Reviewed somewhere that it is necessary to check them if we want to debug orchestrations.

Can anyone please give the pros and cons of checking/unchecking them in UAT and Prod environments. Thankyou.

Hi,

It is not recommended to enable tracking specially message body and properties tracking as for every message BizTalk will track the message in the BizTalk Tracking DB and it is clearly a performance hit on the DB. And if you have huge trafiic going in then it means that the Tracking DB will grow larger in a short span.

BizTalk tracking should only be enabled for the artifacts that requires some debugging at the time of issue. Then it should be stopped.

Rahul

• Edited by RahulS_88 15 hours 51 minutes ago

Hi AnneeLet it be checked in as it is necessary for you to track your Orchestration flow incase of any issue with your Application  . Orchestration tracking enables you to see the instances in the message event and service instance tracking queries from the Group Hub page.

Note :If your production environment is much more stable and you are not getting any application level exception then only you can think of turn off tracking for those events.

Thanks

Abhishek

Careful!

By default Shape start/stop is tracked. This is useful if you are debugging orchestrations via orchestration debugger. In a production environment its very unlikely (or you shouldnt) to use orchestration debugger. So turn off tracking for those events.

Its a good practice to keep UAT and Production on same code base. I would recommend you keep it checked for UAT so that you can debug issues and keep it unchecked in Production.

Hi Annee,

When I checked tracking properties of our Orchestrations, under 'track events', all the 3 options were checked:   'Message start and end', 'Message Send and Receive', 'Shape start and end'

By default the tracking on orchestration will be enabled and that will help you to debug the orchestration. As per my suggestion enable tracking on production only if required to debug the issue.

Tracking incurs performance overhead within BizTalk Server as data has to be written to the MessageBox database and then asynchronously moved to the BizTalk Tracking database. If tracking is not a business requirement, then disable tracking to reduce overhead and increase performance.

Please refer below below links for reference,

Configuring Tracking Using the BizTalk Server Administration Console

How to Configure Tracking for an Orchestration

Performance issues in BizTalk and How to maintain and troubleshoot BizTalk Server databases

Hi,

It is not recommended to enable tracking specially message body and properties tracking as for every message BizTalk will track the message in the BizTalk Tracking DB and it is clearly a performance hit on the DB. And if you have huge trafiic going in then it means that the Tracking DB will grow larger in a short span.

BizTalk tracking should only be enabled for the artifacts that requires some debugging at the time of issue. Then it should be stopped.

Rahul

• Edited by RahulS_88 Thursday, August 27, 2015 3:12 PM

Hi,

It is not recommended to enable tracking specially message body and properties tracking as for every message BizTalk will track the message in the BizTalk Tracking DB and it is clearly a performance hit on the DB. And if you have huge trafiic going in then it means that the Tracking DB will grow larger in a short span.

BizTalk tracking should only be enabled for the artifacts that requires some debugging at the time of issue. Then it should be stopped.

Rahul

• Edited by RahulS_88 Thursday, August 27, 2015 3:12 PM

Thanks for all the responses and suggestions!