HI,

My question is around Biztalk Performance monitor.

At times I support Biztalk Applications in Production and I use various tools to monitor Biztalk throttling. The tools varies from Windows perfmon (monitor Host instances), custom tools of MsgBox (check spool size, others) , Biztalk360 and so on. What I noticed is all these tools help me to identify throttling on the host instance level, not on the Biztalk artifact level.

Now, my problem statement is how can I know which Biztalk application (orchestration / receive location / send location / any ) causing throttling and I would like to achieve this with minimum efforts. If possible I would like to automate this to notify users when throttling occurs.

Kindly correct me if i'm mistaken.

Venkat Kundavaram

Hi Venkat,

This is where host design comes into play. It about how you organize your BizTalk artifacts with regard to hosts. If you were designed the host instance grouping is right way, you can identify the area where the throttling or any issue in the performance occur.

Throttling is to do with the process as whole not just an artifact. If you identify any performance issue in a specific host, then identifying the artifacts running under the specific host and its pattern can led us to the root cause. With the proper design/grouping you can identify the pattern which can help to locate the root cause for performance issues.

Also you cant pinpoint particular artifacts for a performance issue. For example, your Orchestration may be bound to a SQL send port.  If the host that is running the SQL send adapter is under throttling, messages cannot be published and your Orchestration may be held up as result.  So in this case what you can identify from the performance monitors is that there is an issue in message delivery is throttling and this could have impacted the message publishing rate as well. This is why any performance monitoring tools cant point a particular artefact for performance issues. Their process and its pattern have to be identified to find the root cause; this is where our support knowledge experience along with these tools comes into play.

Regards,

M.R.Ashwin Prabhu

Now, my problem statement is how can I know which Biztalk application (orchestration / receive location / send location / any ) causing throttling and I would like to achieve this with minimum efforts. If possible I would like to automate this to notify users when throttling occurs.

Kindly correct me if i'm mistaken.

There is no direct way to measure or detect that.

However, it's pretty easy to interpret what is causing any given performance circumstance by looking at the Active Instances to see what's running.

You can also narrow the investigation by looking at the Duration of any Completed instances.  Any time spent Throttling is counted in the Duration.