Working with Business Activity Monitoring

This topic describes working with Business Activity Monitoring.

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.

The near real-time monitoring process constitutes of a single step called Defining Business Event Responses. Moreover, the periodic monitoring process involves a series of steps such as creating the Process Monitoring Objects, building Business Measures, and KPIs and depicting the monitored results through the Dashboards. The entire process is accomplished through the BAM artifacts.

BAM has the following task-based components:

1. Business Event Response Composer:
   The Business Event Response Composer helps defining the Business Event Responses and facilitates monitoring of the business critical events, occuring in that particular Business Process. A Business Event Response keeps track of the multiple events and compares those event parameters and outcomes against a set of business rules. It also takes the appropriate action if the event falls within the predefined criteria.
2. Process Monitoring Object Modeler: The Process Monitoring Object is the fundamental building block for analyzing the health of the Business Processes. It is the key interface on which the process analysis and monitoring takes place at the appropriate time for aggregated process or activity instances. The Process Monitoring Object comprises the Business Attributes, taken from a Process and the Attributes of an external Web service.
3. Business Measure Editor:
   The Business Measure helps measuring an aspect of a business process or any external data. The Business Measure provides a view on the selected attributes, contained in a Process Monitoring Object or the external data source.
4. KPI Editor:
   The KPI Editor helps defining the expression for the KPIs, using the Business Measure already defined. The results monitored through the KPI help in monitoring and capturing the information related to the business process, and in triggering business actions, as specified. For each KPI, the KPI Editor provides the ability to specify conditions warranting business action and outbound events that represent notifications of such conditions and which may trigger business actions such as E-mail, calling Web service and triggering Business Process.
5. Dashboard Designer:
   The Dashboard Designer allows you to create the dashboards using the already available Business Measures, KPIs, and the Standard Views, which provide a consolidated view on the Process performance.