BizTalk360 Pricing

BTS 360 offers us much more granular security than the standard admin console.

It allows us some autonomy from the infrastructure teams. Once installed we can configure & use the product as a business tool independently from requesting SCOM monitoring from the infrastructure teams. Additionally, we are able to set-up cross-cutting monitoring that would otherwise require liaising with multiple teams within the infrastructure group (OS, IIS, SQL, etc).

We can see the status of the platform (Windows, SQL, etc) without having to give rights to individuals to the underlying servers.

The visual tracking & drilldown features are intuitive and useful and provides a much clearer understanding of message flow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Note: most of these comments are about future improvements.

The product has a large learning curve, especially for anyone with an extensive history of using the standard admin console and – the classification of operations / monitoring / analytics can be confusing. The understanding of creating & mapping alarms also takes some getting used to and it's easy to map an alarm to the wrong application.

We had hoped to remove the standard admin console and revoke all access via the standard BizTalk Administrators AD group – we had mistakenly assumed that BTS 360 replicated all the functionality of the standard admin console. However, BTS 360 does not offer the platform configuration functionality that we need, the most important omissions for us being unable to import / export bindings or change / create ports.

I think that there is an opportunity for adding more value when using the tracking tools, at the moment it seems to be just a web façade on top of the standard BizTalk library. In particular when building queries I would like to see all the filter values pre-populated rather than just replicating the standard admin console; e.g. when building a 'Tracked Service Instances' query the values for 'Assembly Name', 'Service Name', etc. could be pre-populated in the same way that they are for 'Host Name' rather than forcing the user to manually enter the name.

Additionally, we develop our dashboards & alarms in a staging environment & then these need to be moved to a separate installation of BizTalk 360 in our production environment. Support for export / import of alarms, dashboards, queries, etc would be useful.

SQL Server monitoring. Our BizTalk databases run on a SQL Server Failover Cluster instance. The monitoring of these clustered instances was lacking in functionality/accuracy so we are not using that functionality. This could be improved, Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Provides a web based platform and removes the necessity to log-into a PROD environment

2. Access is controlled, provides auditing facility

3. The visual tracking & drill down features are self explanatory and easy to use

4. Removes the dependency on an Admin user to provide simple details (e.g. access to event logs, artifacts etc.)

5. Consolidates everything related to BizTalk in single portal Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Analytics is pretty basic, without a provision to drill down and show what constitutes the graph there is little value it adds.

2. Page rendering is very slow especially the Monitoring/ESB dashboards. If you have large number of monitors configured, these pages can take several minutes to refresh.

3. Alerting features can be improved. For example - BT360 cannot write a event log when a alert is triggered unless sending email is success.

4. Integration to HP OMI/SNOW should be out of the box.

5. Searching criteria are not designed keeping business scenarios in mind. For example there is no way to search the list of ESB Exceptions by selecting a Service Name. Unnecessary intelligence is built in the search criteria, which does nothing but creating confusion. Another example you cannot search by multiple fault codes, range of fault codes etc.

6. Monitoring on the ESB Exception is too high level. There is no way to search by Service Name. No search can be done using context properties where we capture important details like Order Number.

7. Artifact selection section in the Analytics screen is crap. It clearly shows that no appropriate level of UAT done.

8. Search results in Display grids are poorly designed. You cannot expand the screen comfortably without getting annoyed. Each time we had to download the search results.

9. No Import/Export features for Analytics & Operations, If you have 50 dashboards in one environment you will need to recreate in another.

10. Troubleshooting the tool is a nightmare.

11. The support team is very much responsive but lacks the understanding of business problems (it may not be applicable to everyone, could be just our experience)

Overall the product require a good level of inputs from "Real Industry Users".

The Idea behind the product is certainly great and innovative, but a long way to ride before maturing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.