Receiving scheduled MsgBoxViewer-reports via e-mail

Mar 19, 2009

I attended a session the other day at TechDays here in Sweden with Microsoft Escalation Engineer Niklas Engfelt. The session was about troubleshooting BizTalk and Niklas of course showed the wonderful MsgBoxViewer (MBV) tool by Jean-Pierre Auconie. If you haven’t tested and looked deeper into this tool you need to do so. It’s great!

I worked with the tool before but now I wanted to schedule the tool and to have MBV-reports e-mailed to relevant persons within the company on a weekly basis. This is quite easy to accomplish as MBV comes in two version. One GUI-based (shown below) version and one command-line based.

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The command-line version is of course perfect for scheduling using the Windows Task Scheduler.

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If you feel uncomfortable running all the queries (there is a lot of them) on a schedule you can pick some you find important and configure the tool to only run those. Jean-Pierre has a post on how to do just that here.

After MBV has completed all its queries and done its magic it will produce a html-report in the working folder (that’s the folder in the “Start in” field in the scheduled task example above).

We then use a tool called AutoMailer NT (cost €20 - there is a 30 days trial) to:

  1. Poll the working folder for a *.html report file.

  2. Compress the file (using zip).

  3. Send the report to a configured list of recipients.

  4. Delete the report file.

The AutoMailer NT installation is a bit rough (don’t miss to the ****separate download (!) of the trial certificate). But once you have everything working it’s great to have a fresh MBV report in you inbox every Monday telling you how your BizTalk environment is doing and possible issues to attend to.