Business Activity Monitoring - An Overview |
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Introduction
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides an end-to-end, integrated solution for closed-loop monitoring, business event response management, and improvement of business processes. It empowers you with the global visibility of the business processes and the increased responsiveness to them, enabling you to take proactive action based on the actual information. It helps you monitor your company's business processes, identify failures or exceptions, and address them real-time.
BAM provides real-time alerts and notifications on critical events and exceptions, and a centralized performance dashboard. It offers a drill-down analysis to discover trends, patterns, and bottlenecks in enterprise performance.
In addition, BAM also supports monitoring of non-process data (Enterprise Data Objects) that leverages the same functionality as available for business processes. It provides real-time visibility into the effectiveness of overall business performance by monitoring key aspects and alerting users about deviations. This helps the firms to react with a level of agility which was previously unavailable through conventional approaches to business monitoring.
Key Features
BAM has the following key features:
- Near real-time process information collection infrastructure
- Near real-time continuous process monitoring using process content
- Ability to combine contextual information of process for monitoring
- Near real-time monitoring based on process events
- Automatic resolution mechanism in case of exception situations observed during monitoring
- Monitoring external information sources
- Out-of-the box, pre-configured dashboards
- Ability to design custom dashboards
- Drill-down between views for root-cause analysis within custom dashboard
- Visualization through Microsoft Office Excel
- Operational data can be consumed by any Business Intelligence (BI) tool such as Cognos, Business Objects, Jasper and so on, for further analysis
Key Concepts
Architecture
The Architecture of BAM comprises various components, their properties, and the relationships between them. It enables organizations to effectively deploy solution, which can define, monitor, analyze business process and related external sources and take appropriate actions in automated manner whenever required.
Administration
Administration in BAM is a configuration process that allows you to configure the filtering options to synchronize and upload data from the Process database to the BAM database. Filtration of data has a considerable impact on the BAM database.
Artifacts
Various artifacts help in displaying rich BAM capabilities from near real-time monitoring to periodic monitoring and visualization of data through dashboards. BAM has five components:
- For near real time monitoring: Business Event Response Composer
- For periodic monitoring: Monitoring Object Modeler, Business Measure Editor.
- For Visualization: User Interface (Dashboard Designer)
Dashboards
Dashboards in BAM depict the outcome of performance analysis in the form of graphs, dials and so on. Dashboards are of two types - Standard and Custom. The BAM Standard Dashboard helps you to analyze the information related to the process performance by providing some standard views on the process and activities. The Custom Dashboard displays the dashboards created through User Interface for a Business Measure or a KPI.