BizTalk Tracking Advantages

BizTalk allows tracking to be configured at receive, send port and orchestration levels to monitor transaction activity, flow and to access message contents. As long as tracking is enabled at least on one host, all tracked transactions will use that host for tracking (by default, BizTalkServerApplication host is designated for tracking). So it’s not necessary that a tracking host be assigned in a specific application to receive, send ports and orchestrations. Reason being, a message agent that is running within each BizTalk host will be calling a stored procedure that searches through each of the messages in the Messagebox looking for messages with matching subscription information. To keep the Messagebox as empty as possible, the tracking subsystem will move completed messages to the Tracking Database on a periodic basis. The Tracking Database is where the HAT queries for data and displays its tracking information. This is accomplished by a BizTalk host that has been tagged as a “tracking” host.

For most BizTalk customers, tracking data is very important for the following reasons:

• To comply with federal guidelines Sarbane-oxley, IRS and such
• To satisfy accounting department requirements to generate reports for business users, for example using BAM tracking
• In the case of failures and such, to help recover from a disaster, because it is a record of data processing activity
• Data in the tracking databases can be used to help determine the state of the system up to the point of failure for the runtime databases
• Tracked messages and events can indicate what processes may have already happened and what messages have been received or sent
• Tracks the health and run history of BizTalk messages and orchestration processes and aids in identifying errors and bottlenecks in the BizTalk Server environment
• Individual tracking information per message can correlate what types of transactions are taking the most time
• To view the technical details of a particular orchestration, pipeline, or message instance, as well as to see the message flow of a particular message from end to end
• Tracking facilitates troubleshooting of service instances and messages
• It provides debugging capabilities, allowing breakpoints to be set on orchestration shapes
• Business users can view, monitor, and query completed messages and processes via tracked data, saving these queries as custom views for reuse
• Business analysts and end users can track the state of their business processes by viewing both live and archived data

Reference: Apress Pro BizTalk 2006 book