Where did I leave my HAT?

Following an upgrade to BizTalk 2009 you may be left wondering where the Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) Tool has disappeared to. The Start Menu group for BizTalk 2009 no longer contains a link to HAT.

The answer lies in the BizTalk Administration Console MMC Snap-in. If you navigate to the Group Hub and select New Query you will see some new entries in the Value column such as Tracked Service Instances. This will retrieve data in the same way that the HAT queries did.

Right clicking on one of the resultset entries will offer the same options as HAT used to e.g. Message Flow, Orchestration Debugger. Navigate into one of these options presents the same interface as HAT always used to.

In fact HAT is still there under the covers, it's just been integrated into the Admin Console rather than running as a separate application. Try looking in the Task Manager list of running processes and you'll see BTSHatApp.exe.

HAT is dead...long live HAT.