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At one of our customers we faced an issue with a large BizTalk DTA database. To get the growth under control, an investigation was launched to see where we tracked message context and bodies. As everyone probably knows, you can enable tracking on send ports, receive ports, pipelines and orchestrations.

Whilst doing some background research I found this interesting tool, the BizTalk tracking exporting and importing utilities from Rudolf Henning. It's hosted on codeplex so you could even consider accessing the source code an tweaking it to your needs but to be honest I found it useful "out of the box".

BTSGetTrackingOptions.exe

The main use of the first tool "BTSGetTrackingOptions.exe" is to call it as a command line utility with the parameters server (name of database server) and database (biztalk management database name), optionally which application (otherwise all), and even if required specific receive or send port, orchestration or pipeline. The tool will dump the result in the XML file of which you specify the name in the parameters. Any tracking reported will be as an "add" key so you can simply use these to import.

BTSGetTrackingOptions.exe outputfilename.xml -srv:databaseservername -db:BizTalkManagementDatabaseName -a:OptionalApplicationName -r:optionalReceivePortName /s:optionalSendPortName -o:OptionOrchestrationName -p:optionalPipelineName

BTSSetTrackingOptions.exe

The second tool "BTSSetTrackingOptions.exe" is, obviously, for importing an XML file. You can choose to add tracking or remove it and which sort of tracking (depending on the name of the key). As the application, send / receive port, orchestration or pipeline names are defined in the XML you import, there is less need to set options on this tool.

BTSSetTrackingOptions.exe importfilename.xml -s:databaseservername -d:BizTalkManagementDatabaseName

I found this tool lightened my work a lot - both in analyzing the tracking settings and in resetting them.
I even made some command files which call specific XML files so we can easily switch between full tracking and reduced tracking.

Below: a sample of an XML file describing the tracking settings.

Anyone else has some tools for managing BizTalk tracking?