Learn how to Monitor FTP/SFTP/FTPS sites easier with BizTalk360. It offers monitoring of Receive Locations and Send Ports.
Why do we need this feature?
In the day-to-day activities of a BizTalk administrator,
you might come across integrations where FTP sites are used for receiving and transmitting messages. FTP sites are often used for cross-platform integrations. For example, when you have an SAP system on Unix that has to be integrated, via BizTalk Server, with other systems, you might use FTP for receiving and transmitting of messages.
To keep the business process going, it can be of vital importance that the FTP/SFTP sites are online and the messages are being picked up. So, when a BizTalk administrator needs to be constantly aware of whether the FTP/SFTP sites are online and working properly, the administrator needs to monitor the sites and the activities which take place on these sites.
What are the current challenges?BizTalk Server offers no monitoring capabilities, not for Receive Locations / Send Ports and also not for endpoints like FTP, SFTP and FTPS sites. So, using just the out-of-the-box features of BizTalk Server, a BizTalk administrator will have to manually check whether the FTP sites are online and whether all (appropriate) files are being picked up for further processing.
Manual monitoringThis kind of manual monitoring can be quite cumbersome and time-consuming. The administrator will probably use multiple pieces of software to be able to perform these tasks. Think of for example the BizTalk Administration console to check whether the Receive Locations/Send Ports are up and some FTP client to check whether files are being picked up.
It is obvious that this is not a very efficient scenario, which could easily be automated by setting up monitoring.
Maintaining scripts for monitoring FTP sitesTo reduce their workload, we experience that BizTalk administrators are creating their own scripts to monitor FTP sites and all kinds of other resources. Although this kind of script certainly can be of help, we still think this does not fully solve the problem.
To keep the overview, we think that it is easier to use software, like BizTalk360, FTP Monitoring tool, to have everything in one easily accessible place, with good visibility of all the features/capabilities, fine-grained security/auditing, and without the need to maintain custom scripts, etc…
Originally published at BizTalk360 site.
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