In my previous life working with BizTalk Server 2004, I came to view HAT (the Health and Activity Tracking tool) as one of my first ports of call in the case of problems with any of our BizTalk solutions.  When you move to BizTalk Server 2009 it is quickly apparent that HAT is no longer with us.

HAT was useful in BizTalk 2004 mainly as it provided developers and administrators with a number of useful queries and views of what was going on inside BizTalk at runtime; when and what type of messages were received and sent, what messages had been suspended, what orchestration were running or suspended, you could even follow the process flow of a message or orchestration to see what was going on.

With BizTalk Server 2009 much of the functionality of HAT can now be found in the BizTalk Administration console.  Select a BizTalk Group and you will be shown the Group Hub Overview page.  This provides a number of default queries that replicate some of those found in the old HAT.

You can also use the Group Hub page to create new queries.  These can then be saved and loaded in other Group Hub instances - useful for creating queries in development for later use in Test, Psuedo-Live and Live environments.

In the next few posts I am going to look at some of the common queries that we might miss from HAT and recreate them (or something close) using the new query option.

Messages - last 100 received
Messages - last 100 sent
Messages - last 50 suspended
Service instances - last 100

I have yet to try the updated Admin-HAT-Console in anger, and after using old-HAT for so long it may take some getting uesd to, but so far I would say that moving the HAT functionality into the BizTalk Administration console was probably the correct way to go.  Having one tool as the place to look for the combined functionality on offer certainly seems to be the sensible option.