The landscape of Microsoft integration platform is changing day by day adding more and more unique services into its umbrella. Traditionally on-premises integration solutions involved BizTalk Server and WCF web services. With more and more organizations trying to move their applications to the cloud, the Azure Integration Services playing a significant role and they consist of services such as Azure Logic Apps, Functions, Service Bus Queues, Topics, Hybrid connections to Biztalk, etc.
Though the new services try to address the challenges of scale, maintenance, agility, they add some overheads. One such burden is the functional support teams needing to understand all these new technologies. Let us consider an example where a support professional wants to reprocess a message which failed due to data validation. Because Logic Apps, Service Bus Queues, and Azure Functions have different ways of archiving and reprocessing mechanisms, he/she, first to understand the service in which the failure has occurred and action specific to the technology. This is a big overhead on the functional support teams who need to be more business focussed than the technology.
Atomic Scope is a functional end to end monitoring tool for Azure Integration Services and hybrid integration services. It provides a unified approach for reprocessing messages to a diverse set of services. In this article, we will see how Atomic Scope can help functional support teams in reprocessing the messages.
Reprocessing endpoints
Atomic Scope brings the ability to correct and reprocess the messages to two different types of endpoints.
- Http Web endpoints: Atomic Scope can resubmit the message to Http endpoints such as BizTalk WCF-WebHttp, BizTalk Http, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and APIM endpoints. The solutions need to have some design considerations to utilize Atomic Scope’s reprocessing capability.
- WCF-SQL receive locations(BizTalk): In BizTalk integration implementations, it is common that resubmissions happen through SQL Receive locations. A database table acts as a queue to hold resubmitted messages and SQL receive locations poll them and processes them into the message box.
Reprocessing to Web endpoints
Atomic Scope brings the ability to reprocess the messages to web endpoints. These web endpoints can be Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, BizTalk Http receive locations, or BizTalk WebHttp receive locations.
For functional support team, the experience of correcting the messages associated with an activity and resubmitting it to a web endpoint gives great control and flexibility on a day to day support activities.
A stage can be configured for resubmission in Business Process Configuration.
Now consider a scenario where a Sales order transaction fails due to the validation issue. Support team will have to click on the failed transaction to open the flow diagram.
In the flow diagram, click on the failed stage, identify the reason and resubmit the message from the appropriate stage as shown below.
You will have the option to edit the message and resubmit it to Logic App endpoint in Reprocess Details blade.
The approach for reprocessing is the same for Cloud only scenarios involving services such as Logic Apps and Azure Functions.
Reprocessing using WCF-SQL receive location.
To reprocess the messages to wcf-sql receive location one need to configure a stage in a business transaction with correct receive location. The Atomic Scope portal automatically lists all the receive locations with the WCF-SQL adapter configuration.
Please refer the section “How to configure stage for reprocessing” for more information. Note: Each transaction stage can be configured to reprocess the message to a WCF-SQL receive location. The routing and further processing need to be handled by the solution implementation.
Select a failed transaction
Once all the configuration is done, in the tracking UI select a failed transaction as shown below.
On clicking the tracking data, you will see a graphical flow in a blade as shown below.
Reprocess
When you click on the button reprocess, you will be directed to a blade in which you will be allowed to edit the archived message and reprocess it to pre-configured wcf-sql receive location.
Summary
Atomic Scope brings the unified experience of resubmitting the messages to different types of endpoints such as Logic Apps, Azure Functions, WCF services, and BizTalk receive locations. Atomic Scope version 3.0 is GE now. Currently, we are working on version 4.0, in which we are bringing the ability to reprocess the messages to Service Bus Queues, Topics and Event Grids. Hence the approach for resubmission is same for all the technologies which make functional support teams focus on solving actual issues rather than worrying about the technology behind. If you want to know how the Atomic Scope is different from BizTalk360 and Serverless360 please refer to this article.
