BizTalk Health Monitor – From latest BHM report

Today I was doing some cleanup on a Dev and Test environment with BizTalk Health Monitor, when I noticed the “From latest BHM report”, I’m not sure how long that feature has been there, but it makes it easier to find the Tasks that you need to run.

Select From latest BHM report

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Max worker threads for SFTP, MQSC or DB in BizTalk

A about March or earlier, the latest rules for BizTalk Health Monitor started to show the following important warning.

BizTalk Health Monitor Important warning – The host instances of ‘ReceivingSFTP’ need more worker threads per cpu to run correctly SFTP Receive Locations. Increase so the “Maximum Worker Threads” property to 500 for these host instances and be sure they are dedicated for this SFTP Receive Locations

I had already been advising clients to run SFTP receive locations on a separate host instance due to issues where it would silently stop receiving requiring a host instance restart to resolve, possibly related to FIX: SFTP adapter receive locations stop working intermittently during higher load in BizTalk Server

BHM rule 637 – Suggest to Increase MaxWorkerThreads for SFTP, MQSC or DB2 Receive Locations

The rule itself also talks about MQSC and DB, but as I didn’t have any receive locations for those it was only warning about SFTP.

I’ve seen that warning even on a BizTalk 2010 environment that has a Custom SFTP adapter installed, possibly because it was also called simply SFTP. However it does not warn about third party SFTP adapters such as the nSoftware one which has a different name.

BizTalk Host Instance Settings – Maximum worker threads.

However, even after changing the Max worker threads to 500 and restarting the Host Instance and re-running BHM, the warning did not go away. Even moving the receive locations running on the nSoftware onto another host instance, and un-configuring the adapter on that host instance didn’t make any difference.

The BizTalk adapter’s default configuration is to poll every 5 seconds. This is rather excessive and should be reduced.

Recommendations for SFTP Receive Locations

1. Have a dedicated host for receive locations using SFTP
2. Increase the Maximum Worker threads setting to 500 on that host instance
3. Check how frequently you poll (the default is 5 seconds), increase the delay if that is not needed.
4. Put a schedule on to only poll during the periods you need.
5. Disable message body tracking if it is not needed.

.Net 4.6 now supported for BizTalk 2013 R2, BHM 4.1 released

Over a year ago we hit a situation where we got a warning from BHM about .Net 4.6 not being supported, which was a bit of effort to sort out.

Today I looked at the release notes for the latest BizTalk Health Monitor, v4.1 and noticed that in the release notes it said “Removed BizTalk 2013 R2 .NET 4.6.x warning since it is now supported”.   I then checked Hardware and Software Requirements for BizTalk Server 2013 and 2013 R2 and sure enough, they have now listed .Net 4.6 as supported for BizTalk 2013 R2.

Here are the other changes for BizTalk Health Monitor

• Fixed issue with losing monitoring configuration
• Upgraded update mechanism to handle all components of BHM
• Added support for displaying each view of a BHM report in HTML format
• Improved update to happen on secondary thread
• Improved the ChkBHMRep.exe tool
• Added support for BizTalk 2013 R2 CU6, BizTalk 2016 CU1, and BizTalk 2016 FP1 (Feature Pack 1)
• Improved report to provide DTA purge job parameters with improved formatting
• Added warning for infinite max SQL memory config
• Fixed some issues with detecting Host Integration Server CUs
• Removed BizTalk 2013 R2 .NET 4.6.x warning since it is now supported
• Updated query and rules repository

 

‘maxconnection’ property Is not present in some BizTalk process config files

We are using BizTalk Health Monitor 3.0 in a clients environments and we get the warning message

Category: Tuning

Caption: ‘maxconnection’ property

Value: Is not present in some BizTalk process config files – You can configure the number of concurrent connections that the SOAP adapter opens for a particular destination server by adding “maxconnection” entry

However I have checked both the BTSNTSvc.exe.config and the BTSNTSvc64.exe.config and the both do have the maxconnection property.