I'll take a small sidestep from the default architectural posts and blog about our new announcement. Our team is proud to release new version of FRENDS Helium - BizTalk Server monitoring tool. Previous tutorial for Helium is still valid but we added some new features to release. Overall Helium purpose is same as earlier versions - to provide first level support an easy to use tool for viewing status and statistics and possibility to drill into BizTalk executions. 

Helium architecture is somewhat redesigned in version 2.0. Team added a internal database to gather throughput statistics from BizTalk databases to Helium databases. This gives quite significant performance improvements to Helium compared to the option of directly accessing BizTalk databases. Also it gives advanced analytical possibilities based on own database for new features. Tool now contains Helium agent - a Windows service - whose responsibility is to gather throughput statistics from BizTalk Server. Naturally built in Helium database cleanups and backups were implemented into new version to ensure stable and consistent tool. Agent also handles capabilities we call silence monitoring; more about this next.

It's fairly easy to be reactive; when something fails and creates error react on it; forward it or automatically execute actions based on it. FRENDS Radon is a simple tool for sending notifications based on Windows events. Proactive monitoring is also quite typical, based on some trend values or parameters supervise the system and create notification before the actual failure happens. Silence monitoring is a type of proactive monitoring which quite often is forgotten. When BizTalk system is up and running smoothly but nothing is happening it might indicate problems within the overall environment.

In many of our projects customer has had a challenge to detect and react when something is not happening. For example there's possibly an older invoicing system which has some flaws; some of the background processes just hang without crashing the whole system and noticing this typically takes some days. It's not a mission critical thing but in the long run might cost some serious money to the organization. More importantly occasionally sending invoices out  is delayed because of this and it always creates some internal trouble and maybe even few customer reclamations. 

Heliums' silence monitoring feature is developed just for these kind of scenarios. BizTalk is handling the distribution of invoices but if there's nothing to process BizTalk itself does not know that something is wrong. Create silence monitor to Helium and configure that receive port for outbound invoices has to be executed at least once per day; if not Helium will send an alert. It takes only few minutes and now there's process up and running monitoring number of process executions. See technical details from Helium website.