There seems to be a too strong trend in too many product development organizations: This is the trend to only deliver; don’t get me wrong, delivering quality software on time and within budget is a good thing. The issue is that there is in many cases only focus on delivery of software and not too much though and focus on how the operational side of that software will work.
This observation applies to almost all types of projects, with integration projects being no exception. Probably one of the most important factors after releasing your well coded and QA’ed system is ensuring that it is available 99.99% of the time. The point I am trying to make is that no product development lifecycle can be complete without taking into consideration the monitoring of the product in the intended production environment. Very often system implementations are seen as less than successful due to the fact that a production system has gone down without anyone (except of course the users!) knowing about it.
BizTalk or any other integration solution for that fact is no different. In fact the potential problem of downtime and system failure can be multiplied by a factor of the number of systems being integrated. This is where the vision of Minotaur was born.
Minotaur is an essential component in your operational toolbox that will not only provide your BizTalk administrators with up to the minute monitoring metrics via email and a dashboard, but also provide your administrators with proactive monitoring data to try and ensure that your integration systems stay available and healthy.
Minotaur will not only monitor your custom built BizTalk product, but also the overall BizTalk Server environment including the BizTalk databases, services and performance metrics. Minotaur can then also be configured to monitor any peripheral applications and services including SOA services that your BizTalk solution depends on. The end result is complete end to end monitoring of BizTalk centric solutions, not just BizTalk application monitoring; A feature that differentiates Minotaur from the rest.
Many of our competitors’ products will let you know the instant that there is a failure in the environment; we say this is not enough. Failure monitoring should be the absolute minimum that a monitoring product should provide. With Minotaur we wanted to provide more; proactive monitoring and then also a monitoring engine that monitors itself!
Our vision is also to make effective monitoring of BizTalk Server available not only to big budget organizations, but also to smaller companies. This is why Minotaur has a competitive once-off pricing model. You don’t have to incur costly annual expenses to monitor your BizTalk solutions; Minotaur has a once-off purchase price and then an optional annual support and maintenance fee of 20%.
Visit our Minotaur product page to view the complete list of features. We invite you to try the fully functional product for 30 days for free! You will soon realize that Minotaur is the monitoring tool of choice for BizTalk enterprise integration solutions.
