Comments on: Health and Activity Tracking Inaccurate? http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/health-activity-monitoring-inaccurate/ Lessons learned in BizTalk Server, C# and Java Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:49:05 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: Mike Stephenson http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/health-activity-monitoring-inaccurate/#comment-59 Mike Stephenson Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:41:27 +0000 http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/?p=25#comment-59 Hi Again, Some thoughts from my experience that might help: 1. I tend not to use HAT in troubleshooting until I have ruled out a few other things. I find the EventLog/MOM Alerts are always the best first point of call to get information. As Yossi says i think the HAT thing is more a side effect of being able to resume an orchestration. Ive never had this stop me from solving a problem. Yes it would be handy but too often i think people get hung up on HAT as a one stop shop for troubleshooting BizTalk and forget the other sources of information that are available. 2. As a suggestion when you call out from an expression shape I encourage my teams to always call an external assembly preferably with some custom exception handling in, but even if not you would see from the errors stack trace that it clearly came from your custom code Hope these help Mike Hi Again,

Some thoughts from my experience that might help:

1. I tend not to use HAT in troubleshooting until I have ruled out a few other things. I find the EventLog/MOM Alerts are always the best first point of call to get information. As Yossi says i think the HAT thing is more a side effect of being able to resume an orchestration. Ive never had this stop me from solving a problem. Yes it would be handy but too often i think people get hung up on HAT as a one stop shop for troubleshooting BizTalk and forget the other sources of information that are available.

2. As a suggestion when you call out from an expression shape I encourage my teams to always call an external assembly preferably with some custom exception handling in, but even if not you would see from the errors stack trace that it clearly came from your custom code

Hope these help
Mike

]]> By: fehlberg http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/health-activity-monitoring-inaccurate/#comment-43 fehlberg Thu, 01 May 2008 15:01:14 +0000 http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/?p=25#comment-43 Great comment Yossi. Your blog entry was very useful in understanding the "why" of the problem I saw. And yes, I was exagerating a bit when I said, "Don't trust HAT." HAT is still a very useful tool, but it's important to understand that it shows the last good persistence point, as your blog suggested. Great comment Yossi. Your blog entry was very useful in understanding the “why” of the problem I saw. And yes, I was exagerating a bit when I said, “Don’t trust HAT.” HAT is still a very useful tool, but it’s important to understand that it shows the last good persistence point, as your blog suggested.

]]> By: Yossi Dahan http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/health-activity-monitoring-inaccurate/#comment-42 Yossi Dahan Thu, 01 May 2008 07:57:56 +0000 http://fehlberg.wordpress.com/?p=25#comment-42 Hi I share your frastration, this bugged me for a while.... but although I agree agree this is clearly a problem with BizTalk 2006 (wasn't in 2004), "not trusting HAT" is taking it a bit to the extreme in my view. I guess they key is to understand the exact scope of the problem and the underlying reasons so that one can know in which cases one can "trust" HAT and in which cases to be more carefule. I've tried to explain this here: http://www.sabratech.co.uk/blogs/yossidahan/2008/04/and-then-just-when-you-actually-needed.html The point is that for all it's deficiencies HAT is still a very useful tool for the things it does well. BTW - the name of the shape that caused the suspension is generlaly available in the event log entry related to the error, and, as of R2, in the database as well if you want to be sure you're looking at the correct place when troubleshooting. Hi

I share your frastration, this bugged me for a while….
but although I agree agree this is clearly a problem with BizTalk 2006 (wasn’t in 2004), “not trusting HAT” is taking it a bit to the extreme in my view.

I guess they key is to understand the exact scope of the problem and the underlying reasons so that one can know in which cases one can “trust” HAT and in which cases to be more carefule.

I’ve tried to explain this here: http://www.sabratech.co.uk/blogs/yossidahan/2008/04/and-then-just-when-you-actually-needed.html

The point is that for all it’s deficiencies HAT is still a very useful tool for the things it does well.

BTW – the name of the shape that caused the suspension is generlaly available in the event log entry related to the error, and, as of R2, in the database as well if you want to be sure you’re looking at the correct place when troubleshooting.

]]>