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One of the key services provided by the BizTalk server messaging engine is the mechanism for communicating across the applications that a business process uses. As the first steps towards enabling this communication, the messaging engine receives messages from a source application through a receive adapter. The message is then processed through a receive pipeline and delivered into a database called the MessageBox. Depending upon the nature of the messages delivered to the MessageBox, the messaging engine dispatches the messages to their appropriate orchestrations; each orchestration then takes whatever action the business process requires. The result of this processing is typically another message, produced by the orchestration and saved in the MessageBox. This message, in turn, is processed by a send pipeline, and sent out to the application for which it is destined, using a send adapter.

The health of the messaging engine relies heavily on how quickly messages are processed at each step of the electronic data exchange that has been described above. Administrators should be promptly notified of even the slightest of latencies in this communication, so that they can take the measures to curb it before it causes a significant delay in the delivery of messages to the target. The Messaging latency test serves this purpose.

This test closely observes the time taken by the messaging engine to send a message to the MessageBox and to send a message in the MessageBox to the target destination, and proactively alerts administrators to delays; this way, administrators will not only be able to promptly detect latencies experienced by the messaging engine, but will also be able to pin-point where the delay originated - while delivering messages to the MessageBox? or while delivering messages to the destination application?

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
InboundLatency	Indicates the time taken by the messaging engine to receive a document from the receive adapter and publish the same to the MessageBox.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A very high value is indicative of a slowdown while publishing documents to the MessageBox.
OutboundLatency	Indicates the time taken by the messaging engine to receive a document from the MessageBox and send it back to the adapter.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A very high value is indicative of a slowdown in publishing documents to the destination.
RequestResponseLatency	Indicates the time taken by the messaging engine to process a request document from the adapter and send back a response document to the adapter.	Secs	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low. A very high value is indicative of delays in communication across applications.