The Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) examines a BizTalk Server 2010 deployment and generates a list of issues pertaining to best practice standards for BizTalk Server deployments. This tool is designed to assess the configuration of a BizTalk installation. The BPA performs configuration-level verification by gathering data from different information sources, such as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes, SQL Server databases, and registry entries and presents a report to the user. Under the hood, it uses the data to evaluate the deployment configuration. It does not modify any system settings and is not a self-tuning tool. The tool is there to deliver support in achieving the best suitable configuration and report issues or possible issues, that could potentially harm the BizTalk environment.
The latest version of the BPA tool (V1.2) can be obtained from the Microsoft download center (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=93d432fe-1370-4b6d-aaa8-a0c43c30f5ab&displaylang=en) and must be installed on the BizTalk machine. As a user, you need an account that has local administrative rights, that is a member of the BizTalk Server Administrators group, and a member of the SSO Administrators group to be able to run the BPA.
Note
You may need to explicitly set some WMI permissions before you can use the BPA in a distributed environment, where the SQL Server is not installed on the same computer as the BizTalk Server. This is because when the BPA tries to connect to a remote computer running the SQL Server, WMI may not have sufficient access to determine whether the SQL Server Agent is running. This may result in incorrect BPA evaluations.
To run the Best Practices Analyzer, perform one of the following:
Start the BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer from the Start menu. Go to Start | Programs | Microsoft BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyzer.
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the Best Practices Analyzer installation directory (by default,
c:\Program Files\BizTalkBPA\) and double-click onBizTalkBPA.exe.Open a command prompt, change to the installation directory, and then enter
BizTalkBPACmd.exe.
The following steps need to be performed to do the analysis:
As soon as you start the BPA, it will check for updates. The user can decide whether or not to check for updates for newer versions of the configuration:
If a newer version is found, you are able to download the latest updates. The next step is to perform a scan by clicking on Start a scan:
After starting the scan,
starts datawill be gathered from different information sources as described earlier.After the scan has been completed, the user can decide to view the report of the performed scan:
You can click View a report of this Best Practices scan and the report will be generated. After generation of the report, several tabs will appear:
Critical Issues
All Issues
Non-Default Settings
Recent Changes
Baseline
Informational Items
When the BPA is running, it gathers information and evaluates them to best practice rules from the Microsoft product group and support. A report is presented to the user providing information on issues, non-default settings, changes, and so on. The report enables you to take action and apply the necessary changes to resolve identified issues. The BPA can be run again to verify that it adheres to all the necessary best practices. This shows the value of the tool when assessing the deployed BizTalk environment before it is operational. When BizTalk becomes operational, the MessageBox Viewer (MBV) has more value.
The BPA is very useful and gives you information that helps you to tune BizTalk and to keep it healthy. There are more tools that can help in sustaining a healthy environment overall. The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 BPA is a diagnostic tool that provides information about a server and a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 instance installed on that server.
The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=15289.
There are a couple of analyzers provided by Microsoft that do a good job helping you and the system engineer to put out a healthy, robust, and stable environment:
Best Practices Analyzer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd759260.aspx
Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=16475
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.1.1: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=19892