BizTalk 360 – Atomic Scope, BAM replacement?
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that ships with BizTalk Server, is very powerful, way underestimated and underutilized by many developers, I am not sure if it is due to lack of understanding about it, or if they are turned off by the BAM portal antiquated user interface (UI). Although you could build a new, modern web site from scratch on top of BAM back-end DB views, it is still a lot of work.
BizTalk developers have long wondered if Microsoft will ever revamp BAM portal, however, in my opinion, Microsoft has setup this portal as a light-weight, simple site that does the job right, and the matter of fact, it really does everything it is supposed to be doing perfectly, if only it did look more modernized!
In October 2017, at Integrate USA Evevnt, Saravana announced “Atomic Scope” for Business users using pipeline components and a portal. I have to say Saravana & BizTalk360 team has an eye for good opportunities such as this one.
As I mentioned earlier, there is indeed a gap for a ready-made, modernized Business Activity monitoring portal. I was excited about it and had the pleasure of trying out the first version in March 2018.
Contrary to my expectations, Atomic Scope didn’t rely on BAM back-end DB, or even the BizTalk Tracking DB, instead it has its own DB back-end, thus providing a full-fledged standalone platform instead of just providing a new UI that is built on top of BAM infrastructure.
I think from a design perspective, it was a wise decision to avoid being limited by BAM DB design and also to make Atomic Scope platform standalone and avoid the risk of being dependent on Microsoft’s BAM DB, in case of any DB structure changes that could happen in the future.
After using it for a couple of weeks, I really liked the simplicity of it, and the intuitive components and features. The concepts are very generic and allow for any business activity to be defined, tracked, and displayed. Related Activities can be also defined, to correlate different business-related transactions, similar to BAM continuation and relationship concepts.
Business fields in the message payload can be tracked and searched upon, custom business error could be defined and tracked easily.
I was so excited trying Atomic Scope for the 1st time, that I sent this screenshot to my colleague using my mobile
My only concern was the increased latency due to DB operations when receiving and sending messages with Atomic scope pipeline components on the BizTalk ports, as Atomic Scope relied on intercepting messages in pipeline components and then log these inbound/outbound messages to its DB.
I didn’t perform stress testing myself, but the BizTalk360 team assured me, in April 2018 Atomic Scope Webinar Q&A, that they had done stress testing, and that the impact is minimal.
Another enhancement would be to have business data visualization on the tracked data, like in BAM’s dimensions and measures interactive charts, to truly provide a self-service business intelligence.
Customers always ask about data visualization especially for business users, and BAM excels in that as of now.
So is Atomic Scope a replacement for BAM?
Indeed, it could be so in the future, after Atomic Scope has matured, and be on par with BAM features, also one thing to remember, BAM ships free with BizTalk server, so some customers will turn a blind eye on the outdated BAM portal UI, if it already does the job.
I will try to have some in-depth articles on Atomic Scope.