I've read thru several articles on what Business Activity Monitoring is about but none of them demonstrate real world example of how having BAM enabled is a benefit and what it can do? Hopelessly generic documentation from Microsoft.
I'm currently migrating a BizTalk 2016 server to BizTalk 2020 (both production and development) and our existing BizTalk 2016 server does NOT have BAM enabled.
How is BAM different from looking at the BT Admin Console and navigating thru Tracked Message Events, Transmission Failure events, etc.
It looks like I can specify BAM Alerts that can be setup for SMTP (send via email), file location, and/or SQL Server database. Other than potential error message monitoring, does BAM provide historical conversion EDI data with validation and/or data not validated?
Please note that Microsoft have deprecated the BAM Portal in BizTalk 2020 Microsoft, so one of the features that BAM was useful for, in reporting and being able to query the BAM cubes is going away (although no announcement about a BizTalk version after BizTalk 2020 yet).
The BizTalk Admin console will only report on what is in the DTA database where the retention period is usually measured in a few weeks. What BAM is useful for is having some details of messages over a longer period, as it summarizes them into Cubes per month, and you can set the retention period for a long time (several years), so you can report on statistics of messages processed and speed of processing over a long period.
I've never used BAM Alert for error monitoring except for sending alerts when there is an absence or too low a count of a certain message in a time period. For actual exception handling we've used either a framework custom written by the company I work for or the ESB Toolkit ESB Management Portal to subscribe to failed message and send out alerts.
Also as per Alternatives for the Deprecated BAM Portal, implementing BAM and maintaining it is not easy, as it requires using clunky tools (Excel with a plug-in) and the deployment and redeployment process is also not straightforward.
I've also multiple times had issues with the BAM database growing too fast and jobs starting to fail.
My recommendation would be to Enable Analytics and send your track data to Application Insights. As you are probably either moving to cloud or have a hybrid scenario already and if you are using Azure this gives you one place to do tracking and analysis and to set up alerts rather having two separate places.