BT Messaging Latency Test

One of the key services provided by the BizTalk server messaging engine is the mechanism for communicating across the applications that a business process uses. As the first steps towards enabling this communication, the messaging engine receives messages from a source application through a receive adapter. The message is then processed through a receive pipeline and delivered into a database called the MessageBox. Depending upon the nature of the messages delivered to the MessageBox, the messaging engine dispatches the messages to their appropriate orchestrations; each orchestration then takes whatever action the business process requires. The result of this processing is typically another message, produced by the orchestration and saved in the MessageBox. This message, in turn, is processed by a send pipeline, and sent out to the application for which it is destined, using a send adapter.

The health of the messaging engine relies heavily on how quickly messages are processed at each step of the electronic data exchange that has been described above. Administrators should be promptly notified of even the slightest of latencies in this communication, so that they can take the measures to curb it before it causes a significant delay in the delivery of messages to the target. The Messaging latency test serves this purpose.

The test closely observes the time taken by the messaging engine to send a message to the MessageBox and to send a message in the MessageBox to the target destination, and proactively alerts administrators to delays; this way, administrators will not only be able to promptly detect latencies experienced by the messaging engine, but will also be able to pin-point where the delay originated - while delivering messages to the MessageBox? or while delivering messages to the destination application? 

Target of the test : A BizTalk Server 2010

Agent deploying the test : An internal agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for each host instance on the BizTalk server being monitored

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameters	Description
Test period	This indicates how often should the test be executed.
Host	The host for which this test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the host listens to.
Ispassive	If this parameter is set to Yes, then it means that, by default, all BizTalk servers being monitored by the eG system are the passive servers of a BizTalk cluster. No alerts will be generated if the servers are not running. Measures will be reported as "Not applicable" by the agent if the servers are not up.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Inbound Latency	Indicates the time taken by the messaging engine to receive a document from the receive adapter and publish it to the MessageBox.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A very high value is indicative of a slowdown while publishing documents to the MessageBox.
Outbound Latency	Indicates the time taken by the messaging engine to receive a document from the MessageBox and send it to the adapter.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A very high value is indicative of a slowdown in publishing documents to the destination.
Request-Response Latency	Indicates the total time taken by the messaging engine to process a request document from the adapter and send back a response document to the adapter.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A very high value is indicative of delays in communication across applications.