Monitoring Business Activity

The most critical factor for the success of any business is getting the right information at the right time. The ease of information access can determine the fate of business deals and partnerships. One of the major incentives driving growth and demand for a new generation of integration solutions is the ability to provide both technical and non-technical users with end-to-end visibility into the business process on a near real-time basis. This improved visibility enables organizations to make timely and well-formed decisions to improve business agility and customer satisfaction.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) in BizTalk Server 2009 allows business analysts, developers, and information workers to monitor and analyze data from business process information sources in real time. By using BAM, users can get information about business state, trends, and critical conditions.

Additionally, the BAM application programming interface (API) enables developers to expose visibility into data that is external to BizTalk processes, such as archival data or other non-BizTalk processes and systems. Developers, administrators, business analysts, and end users can use the BAM Portal to view, aggregate, search, or create alerts based on the data collected by BAM.

BAM Activities

To gather the necessary business data, you need to create one or more BAM activities. A BAM activity represents a unit of work in a business, such as a purchase order or a loan application. BAM activities can also contain milestones, which are a date/time measure, throughout the business process that allow business analysts to see the overall progress of the business process and investigate each individual step of the process. BAM activities are independent of the actual implementation of your BizTalk solution. Think of a BAM activity as a record in an SQL table that you keep in synchronization with the actual unit of work.

You can relate multiple BAM activities together as well. An example of relating activities is a situation where a single purchase order contains multiple shipments. Properly configured BAM activities can allow you to view the shipping information for each item in the purchase order. You can use the BAM API to create BAM activities that span multiple disparate systems. For example, if one step in a loan process is to execute a Web service or make a call to a mainframe system, business analysts can include this data in their analysis.

Note: For more information on BAM activities, refer to “Using Business Activity Monitoring” and “About BAM Activities” in the BizTalk Server 2009 documentation.

BAM Views

Once you have defined the information that you want BAM to collect, you need to define how the data will be displayed or viewed. To do this you define a BAM view; the view defines the context for the information being collected.

Because there are business processes that several different users will have an interest in it's important to be able to provide different contexts for the same data based on the user accessing it. A single BAM activity can have multiple views; there could be a Store Manager view, a Sales Associate view, and a Supplier view. While that actual data displayed is the same for all three views the way that it is displayed can change based on how the user wants to consume it.

Aggregating and Filtering Data

BAM provides interceptors that are used to gather data from incoming messages and from any point within the business process such as an orchestration, pipeline, or message type. By aggregating data, BAM provides an overview of business trends. You can also use BAM to link together various messages as they travel through the system to create a unified BAM view, which shows the entire business process and spans multiple orchestrations and data external to BizTalk Server. This visibility is tremendously beneficial for users making critical business decisions.

You can also filter the data received from BAM. This can be useful, for example, if you want to see loans that were processed from a certain state or by a certain loan officer or between two dates. Filtering allows business users to focus on only the data they require to make business decisions such as:

Note: You can share BAM databases across BizTalk groups to present an aggregated view of a business process.

Gaining Better Visibility in SOA Solutions

A major goal for SOA is to provide total process visibility. In some cases, there are dozens or hundreds of different services, each of which plays its own part in a larger business process. Each one of these services is likely to have its own tracking or monitoring mechanism. By using BAM, a developer could create a single activity that spans across all of these processes and gathers the relevant information about each process. This kind of implementation provides a single view for information about the process as a whole rather than using different tools to look at disparate data stores to view information about a single service.

BizTalk Server 2009 BAM Poster