Need for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
In a real-time business scenario, various Azure services are integrated to define a business process. Day by day these business processes grow in complexity and monitoring them turns out to be a real challenge. In order to overcome these challenges, Serverless360 provides end-to-end distributed tracing via Business Activity Monitoring.
Please refer this article for an “Introduction to BAM in Serverless360”.
What’s new?
Now let’s get into the core purpose of this blog to know the new capabilities in BAM:
- Enhanced Key Features
- Simplified Transaction Builder
- Assured Tracking
- Connectors to Facilitate Instrumentation
- Business Analytics through a Configurable Dashboard
- Business Process Monitoring
Enhanced Key Features
The main perk of BAM is the scaled-up key features that appraise the performance of the process:
Simplified Usability
The usability is much more effective, helping you define your business process in a way that makes sense. Serverless360 BAM aims at reducing the “time to value” so that you can see BAM data from your solution within a few minutes.
Check out how simple it is to start off with BAM in our “Step by Step guide”
High Reliability
This improved version provides an intense architecture to ensure every message involved in the business process are tracked without fail. Our Engineering team had spent sincere efforts in building a robust system that can achieve a highly reliable end to end tracking.
Improved Security
Feedback from customers clearly revealed that they would need to host and access their own data. You can associate your Storage Account and SQL database into which the BAM tracking information will be stored. We understand the sensitivity of the business information we are dealing with in BAM. Data security has been taken care of both at rest and at transit.
To know about the BAM please refer our extensive documentation on “Implementing BAM”.
Seamless Performance
Though BAM is right now being offered as a SaaS solution, you can be rest assured that usage by any other customer will not impact the performance of your tracking as the whole BAM infrastructure of yours will be completely isolated from that of others to deliver a seamless performance.
Simplified Transaction Builder
Let us consider a familiar real-time business scenario to understand and appreciate how BAM simplifies the complex requirement of achieving end-to-end tracking of the message flowing through the business transaction. The application here is a Cab booking application which is built as below,
The Cab Booking process involves multiple stages to complete a transaction. Alignment of these stages can be achieved at ease by defining a business process. BAM provides a simplified Business Transaction Builder where the configuration of the stages is facile. Given below is the business flow for the booking process in a Cab Booking Application.
As the message flows through these stages, it would be necessary to keep track of certain important properties to understand how the business working is. Each stage can have multiple custom properties like User Id, Driver Id and Location configured in it to be tracked.
These properties can be defined as a global property or can be confined to the respective stage based on their nature. Batch Id and Correlation Id are predefined properties. Any unexpected failure or exception in the stage can be rectified by enabling the Reprocess Configuration which will turn out to be a valuable feature to restore business from failure.
Assured Tracking
In the cab booking scenario, tracking plays an important role in the entire process. BAM provides eminent capabilities to keep track of what is happening to the business process.
Here are some key features of tracking and filtering in BAM:
- View tracked data at every stage
- Detect exceptions
- Reprocess failed stages
- Search through custom query
- Save query for frequent use
With such exceptional capabilities tracking and monitoring becomes very simple and effortless for complex business processes.
Connectors to facilitate instrumentation
BAM is technology agnostic and platform-independent. We have got connectors to support all possible applications. Logic Apps and Microsoft Flow can be instrumented using custom connectors. Functions and .Net applications can use the .Net SDK published. Any application built on any technology can invoke the exposed HTTP API endpoint to enable tracking in the business application.
Below is a Logic App connector to facilitate:
- Start Transaction
- Checkpoint Transaction
BAM generates a transaction Instance Id in the start transaction connector which can be carried forward to every subsequent stage through dynamic properties. The connectors are built to help quick instrument your application to achieve tracking.
Business Analytics through a configurable dashboard
The graphical representation of analytic information of a business process can be configured with the composite application dashboard to impart a clear understanding of the status of the activities to various stakeholders in the organisation. With the help of the dashboard configured analytics in Serverless360, user can visualize business data as widgets based on the configured queries and acquire better insights.
Business Process Monitoring
Consider a salesperson of an organisation who requires an alert when the count of failed transactions goes beyond a certain limit at a location or an alert whenever there is an exception. For achieving these requirements, there will be a need for a powerful monitoring tool that works on various perspectives. Serverless360 comes with an out of box monitoring solution, Business Process Monitor for monitoring business processes based on queries and for any exception.
Conclusion
BAM is explicitly designed to focus on the end to end tracking of messages in a business process and its analytics. It reduces the Total Cost of Ownership and reduces the effort spent on building solution to do end-to-end trackability by 20%. To have a detailed description on the working of BAM refer the extensive product documentation.
Please access the complete BAM feature documentation for more details.
