Biztalk not tracking send/receive ports

Question

It seems that any new send or receive ports that I create do not display any tracking even if I tick all the tracking boxes. I have an existing application and the receive port and orchestration tracking work, but the send port tracking doesn't.

On the same machine I also tried creating a new application. Created a send and a receive port and no tracking at all. I did the same thing on a fresh install of biztalk on another machine and I got tracking so I'm not crazy.

I've tried ...

• ticking every box in tracking for the receive, orch, send ports.
• creating a new host specifically for tracking
• recreating the original host with a different name
• sql service is running
• reboot system
• reboot host instances
• restart biztalk services
• nothing shows in event logs
• all sql jobs ok except for 'monitor biztalk' which complains about 7 orphaned dta.
• can't see anything in particular that stands out from mbv except for the above mentioned oraphaned dta.

Answer 1

In addition to Mike's answer:

1. You need to ensure that at least one of your hosts is enabled for tracking. In BizTalk Administrator, under Platform Settings, Hosts, Select the host, and enable tracking (the list of hosts also shows which host(s) are current tracking enabled).

2. You can also verify that the tracking SQL Agent job is running by looking directly at the database

   select count(*) from BizTalkMsgBoxDb.dbo.Spool (NOLOCK)

   select count(*) from BizTalkDTADb.dbo.Tracking_Parts1 (NOLOCK)

Basically, spool should be a fairly low number (< 10 000), and should come back to a static level after a spike in messages, unless your suspended orchs are growing. And new messages should be copied across from the MessageBox to DtaDb.TrackingParts every minute, so Tracking_Parts1 should grow a few records every 60-120 seconds after processing new messages, although they will be eventually purged / archived in line with your tracking archiving / purge strategy.

In a Dev environment, the more tracking the merrier, as HAT (the orchestration debugger) will give you more information the more you track. However, in a PROD environment, you would typically want to minimize tracking to improve performance and reduce disk overhead. We just track one copy, viz 'before processing' on the receive and 'after processing' on the send ports to our partners, and nothing at all on internal Ports and Orchs. This allows us to provide sufficient evidence of data received and sent.

Answer 2

This post might help some people: http://learningcenter2.eworldtree.net:7090/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=78

For message tracking to work, among other factors, make sure that the "Message send and receive events" checkbox in the corresponding pipeline is enabled.