Where Did My HAT Functionality Go in BizTalk 2006?

Since the last couple of weeks I’m spending again some time with BizTalk. Although there is no official training material for BizTalk Server 2006 available yet, U2U is already offering BizTalk 2006 training. So it was about time to upgrade my BizTalk Server 2004 skills!

The first thing that I actually had to search for was the functionality that was previously available in Health and Activity Tracking (HAT). In HAT 2004 you can run queries that display the currently running, suspended ... orchestration instances. HAT is still available in when you install BizTalk 2006, but the Queries menu is quite empty:

A great deal of monitoring functionality in BizTalk Server 2006 has been moved to the Administration Console. This tool offers a centralized place to keep an eye on your BizTalk instances: the Group Hub.

The page above gives a nice overview of what’s happening. Clicking on a hyperlink drills further into the requested report. Cool!