Quit looking! They’re not there. Bummer!
The only counters available are those available for the Receive Locations running in the in-process hosts.
There are *no* counters available for the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 WCF Send Adapters.
For more information:
I’ve been involved in designing and documenting a 5-day stress test for a customer and wanted to share a couple of findings and tips with the community.
First of all: LoadGen is proving itself again and again! The documentation is not quite complete and accurate (and most samples I’ve seen in blogs are just not working - maybe a next post?), but once you’ve figured that out and got it up-and-running, its easy to tweak it to the needs for that particular customer you’re working for.
Now during stress testing there are a number of things you’d want to monitor: CPU and Memory usage on all machines and Disk IO and queue lengths (and maybe the average lock wait time and average lock timeouts/sec) on SQL are the most important ones. Of course the BizTalk counters for Spoolsize, Documents processed/sec, Orchestrations processed/sec and Orchestration persistence points/sec are important ones to monitor. Windows’ Perfmon is the ideal tool to be used there. You can see (and log) all counters in one console and once the stress test is over, you can analyze the logs with the same tool. Like this, you can detect memory leaks, CPU uptrens and SQL ‘drowning’ issues.
After running the test, the hard part starts: Analyzing the results.
From a BizTalk perspective, you’d want to know if there is an uptrend in response times and/or message throughput. I still think that HAT is the ideal tool here. Just change the query ‘last 100 orchestrations’ (remove the top xxx from the query) and execute it. Then save the results as Excel and start doing your analysis.
Now there’s one thing that’s quite important if you run tests that run for more than 1 day: Disable the SQL Agent job: “DTA Purge and Archive (BizTalkDTADb)” (this job continuously archives all tracked messages that are more than 1 day old by default) and make sure there’s enough disk space for keeping all the handled messages in the DTA database. This is crucial for being able to analyse ALL the message traffic. Otherwise you end up restoring a couple of DTA backups….
One last thing I’d like to remind you of: Don’t forget to also log all the counters you see in Perfmon. It’s happened to quite some people (including me) that you added a counter to the Perfmon console, and forgot to also log it…
Cheers! Gijs.
On May 1st, Microsoft officially announced that they have acquired Covast B2B technology to incorporate it in a next version of BizTalk Server. See Steven Martin’s (Director of Marketing for the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft) blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/05/01/enhancements-to-biztalk-b2b-functionality.aspx for the details on the deal.
As the CTO and co-founder of Covast and the architect of the technology, I’m personally quite proud of this! BizTalk Server (probably an “Advanced B2B Pack” for BizTalk Server R3 - final plans not ready yet) will incorporate our technology to provide the advanced B2B features that we’ve developed and sold in the past 12+ years. Our EDI Accelerator for BizTalk Server 2000 was the first B2B add-on specifically for BizTalk Server and we’ve continued to develop new releases for each new BizTalk Server version, including the current R2 release. Today, more than 500 customers actually use our software in combination with BizTalk Server.
We’ve always worked very closely together with Microsoft and the fact that they have now acquired our technology to become part of the BizTalk Server product was only something that was bound to happen in the end.
We will of course continue to provide the level of support and services to our current customers that they’ve grown accustomed to and we will also continue to develop great new products, like the BizTalk Server based B2B Appliance BBot and … stay tuned for more exciting news in the near future.
