New Biztalk 2013 management pack available

A few days ago Microsoft released the BizTalk 2013 management pack into the wild with version 7.0.1033.0
It can be found and downloaded from this page.
So of course this is a fresh pack to monitor BizTalk Server 2013 with. At the basis was the BizTalk 2010 management pack, however a few known issues and a few remarks from the MVP community were taken into account. SO this pack is better than the 2010 pack. Especially the amount of alerts is less now, because some seemingly duplicate alerts are being suppressed. This means that I do not have to write another Noise Reduction Management pack for this 2013 version of the pack anymore B)
There are some things to keep into account though.
If you are intending to run BizTalk 2010 and BizTalk 2013 monitoring side by side there are a few things.

  • FIrst of all when running both downloaded MSI files to extract the management packs from them the second MSI will fail telling you it is already installed. Simply remove the other one from control panel programs and run the other one. Remember to first copy the extracted .mp files from the “c:\program files (x86)\system center management packs\” directory!
  • Second if you install both the RFID management pack files, the second one will give an error due to duplicate relationship type.
  • And you will notice that when looking into the authoring pane and such while trying to find one of the classes/rules/monitors and such the entries for both versions look the same. Its a bit of a search to find which is which in some cases. By the way also in the management pack list and in the runas profiles there will be duplicate entries (seemingly). Underneath they are different and version specific though.

It is good to see some improvements have been made to the pack, and I certainly hope the next itteration will contain more fixes to already communicated details and small issues surrounding these kind of packs. We are moving forward with this.
So enjoy your BizTalk monitoring!
Bob Cornelissen