Have you ever created a custom monitoring or troubleshooting tool (or data store) for working with BizTalk, and wanted the ability to launch the HAT (Health and Activity Tracker) tool in a particular context? Here are the command line parameters that will enable you to do just that…
First, though you can typically launch the HAT tool from "C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\BTSHatApp.exe", for a production tool you probably want to read the install location of BizTalk from the registry at “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BizTalk Server\3.0\InstallPath.”
The command line syntax looks like:
BTSHatApp.exe “btshat:“ViewName:<OrchDebugger|MessageFlow|SvcInstQuery> MgmtSvr:<your server> MgmtDb:<your mgmt db> SvcInstId:<service instance id> [MsgId:]<optional msg id>””
OrchDebugger and MessageFlow bring up the expected HAT views that you are familiar with. SvcInstQuery will actually open the BizTalk Admin console, with a query set up so you can see a live service instance with associated messages, etc.
You can also launch with the name of a saved tracking query, as in:
BTSHatApp.exe "c:\program files\microsoft biztalk server 2006\tracking\queries\MessagesSentInPastDay.trq"
The BizTalk management pack for Microsoft Operations Manager appears to use this command line interface so that it can provide built-in tasks to launch HAT with the context present in captured event log entires. This means that if you have the MOM operator console installed on a machine that is joined to a BizTalk group, you have a nicely integrated set of troubleshooting tools.