Web services |
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Web Services are self-contained, modular applications that can be described, published, located, and invoked over the Web. These services range across different businesses, partners, customers, and so on catering to various business activities. The service could be as simple as World Time Service that gives the time for a city, a credit card transaction or a full blown business service. A complex service would include other services within. Web Services share the business logic, data, and processes through a programmatic interface and are just like application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.
In BAM context, BAM can monitor data from a Web service. The Web service can get the result either from an expression or from a database query result.
The Web services are consumed in the Business Measures and these Business Measures are used to visualize the required data in an output format using custom dashboard in BAM.
The Web services can be used to define complex queries like making a compound measure using two business measures. For example: In an Order handling process, the order status changes from 'Received' to 'In-progress' to 'Accepted'. One of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for this process is that for 90% of the Orders received, the time between 'In-progress' and 'Accepted' is maximum 5 days. You need to show a KPI that if the SLA is met (if 90% of the orders received are handled on time). For this we need to define two business measures (that can be achieved using Business Measure Editor): A) one that counts the total number of processes that reached the 'Accepted' state B) one that counts the number of processes that reached the 'Accepted' state in 5 days.
On top of these two measures we need to define a 'compound' measure that calculates the percentage of processes on time, in other words, (A/B)*100. This can be achieved by a custom java call and making it available as a Process Platform Web service with expected output format that BAM requires.
BAM can monitor the Web services that are available in Process Platform environment only.