What is a BizTalk Administrator

This is a question i get all the time. What is a BizTalk Administrator?

A BizTalk administrator has a lot of important roles to take care of. A good BizTalk Administrator should have good knowledge of Microsoft servers, SQL, PowerShell, IIS, .NET, infrastructure, Network and preferably Oracle, fileshares, WCF and other adapters used by your company.

The biggest difference between a BizTalk developer and Administrator is that the administrator has nothing to do with developing integration (basic file integrations can be created by the administrator). The administrator should have good knowledge of BizTalk, how it works, how to run health checks, stress testing, migrating integration and know how to create good integrations. It's so sort of an Architect job, but at the same time not.

The Administrator should have the full responsibility of accepting new integrations, integrations violating the framework should not be accepted, the ability to suspend integrations giving to many errors not defined in the documentation of the integration. Or even integrations giving the environment problems or issues should be suspended.

The administrator should have full knowledge of the health of the environment and how to tune it, there is no environment the same, so a full knowledge of the environment running at the company should be well known for the administrator.

Knowledge of the adapters being used, how they work at how to check for errors on different adapters, a knowledge of the most common errors and what they mean. The administrator should also know how to set up a complete environment from scratch and how to do a disaster recovery if everything goes wrong. Knowledge on how to set up the backup jobs, and the different SQL job required for BizTalk, a good knowledge of the BizTalk SQL is also impotent.

Creating PowerShell commands to enhance the productivity of BizTalk. How to export multiple messages at the same time (BizTalk has these powershell method already made for you, all you need to do is change them for your need).

A BizTalk administrator should be well known of throttling, and how to change edit and debug possible throttling errors.

Performance Counters are many for BizTalk, which one are impotent to monitor at all times. And how do you read them, a BizTalk administrator should know this. How does a DFS fileshare work, what are known bugs and possible scenarios if you create a lot of receive locations and send ports towards one file server?

How to set up a "Microsoft best practice" environment, is this something for you or do you have to do it another way?

How many servers should you be running, what will happen in the next two years, are the integrations able to migrate to a newer BizTalk version.

How does SCOM work, how can it enhance your stability and monitoring. How does the BizTalk pack for SCOM work, and how can you use the benefits from this in your everyday work.

Should you use a third party monitoring service like IPM, Minotaur or BizTalk Monitord (I recommend the last one). Do you need tracking on some if the integrations, what are you tools for this, how do they work?

This is just a little of it all, more will come later. So keep following.

Best wishes!