Current State Assessment

You will need to perform a current state assessment of your BizTalk environment to workout what you have and what will need to be migrated.  Below are some thoughts on how to do this.

Environment Inventory

• Servers & Infrastructure

  • Number of BizTalk servers, SQL Servers, SSO, and supporting components.

  • OS/SQL/BizTalk versions and patch levels.

  • On-premises vs VM hosting.

• Licensing & Costs

  • BizTalk editions in use (Enterprise, Standard, Branch).

  • SQL Server licenses, Windows Server, support contracts.

  • Hardware maintenance or VM hosting costs.

Application & Artifact Discovery

• BizTalk Applications

  • Number of deployed applications.

  • Orchestrations, pipelines, maps, schemas.

  • Custom .NET components / assemblies.

• Adapters in Use

  • File, FTP/SFTP, HTTP/S, WCF, SQL, SAP, MQ, MSMQ, etc.

  • Identify dependencies on legacy adapters that may not exist in Azure.

• Messaging

  • Message types, schemas, transformations.

  • Batch vs real-time flows.

Integration Landscape

• Source & Target Systems

  • Internal apps (ERP, CRM, DBs).

  • External partners (EDI, B2B, APIs).

  • SaaS (Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc.).

• Protocols

  • SOAP, REST, flat file, EDI, etc.

• Volume & Performance

  • Transactions per day, message size, peak loads.

  • SLAs for latency and throughput.

Business Process Discovery

• Stakeholders

  • Identify internal and external stakeholders involved in each business transaction

• Processes and Transactions

  • Create an inventory of your business processes and transactions.  This will contribute to your interface catalog

• Timings and schedules

  • Understand the times of day that interfaces do their job

• Exception Scenarios

  • Understand key business exception scenarios

  • Understand compensation patterns

Testing

• Test Cases

  • Identify existing test cases you might have

  • Many organisations have lost test cases over the years so this might be a key risk

  • Identify when interfaces were last tested

• Environments

  • Map the instances of applications for each environment so you will know limits on testing

• Stakeholders

  • Identify who can help from application teams to perform tests

Non Functional Requirements

• Security

  • Understand security requirements and constraints

  • This will affect some of the design choices you will make later

• Performance

  • Understand application and business process performance requirements

  • N x messages per hour

  • X seconds latency, etc

  • This will affect design choices

• Reliability

  • Understand availability and DR requirements

  • This will affect costs and design choices

Operations & Support

• Monitoring

  • How is BizTalk monitored today (Scom, custom tools)?

• Error Handling

  • Suspended messages, retry policies, escalation.

• Support Model

  • Who manages BizTalk (internal team, MSP)?

• Change/Deployment Process

  • How are applications deployed (manual, BTDF, CI/CD)?

Governance & Compliance

• Security

  • Authentication/authorization (AD, SSO).

  • Certificates, encryption.

• Data Residency

  • Where sensitive data is processed/stored.

• Audit/Logging

  • Current audit controls, log retention.

Tools & Techniques to Help

• BizTalk360 (if you have it) → excellent for inventory & reporting.

• BizTalk Health Monitor (BHM) → Microsoft tool to gather configuration, performance, and environment health.

• PowerShell & WMI scripts → extract lists of applications, ports, orchestrations, etc.

• SSRS/SQL Queries → report on message volumes and tracking DB size.

• Manual Workshops → interview business & technical owners to validate integrations.

Outputs of the Assessment

• Application Inventory → full list of BizTalk apps, orchestrations, schemas, pipelines, ports.

• Integration Catalog → systems connected, message types, volumes, SLAs.

• Infrastructure Baseline → servers, versions, licensing, support costs.

• Risk & Constraint Register → legacy dependencies, unsupported adapters, high-volume flows.

• Migration Candidates → quick wins vs complex apps (for phased approach).