The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary - Business Activity Monitoring

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

Business Activity Monitoring refers to the process activity monitoring layer of the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform. With BAM you can monitor any process activity while applying the specific data of the process model. BAM allows you to measure the performance of the active processes with respect to the specific data of the process model itself.

It will show generic process performance measures like the number of active or running process instances or using the data of the specific, showing the number of active process per product, service, region, etc. referring to any of the internal data used in the process. BAM uses a separate repository for calculating the process performance measures. By default, the OTPS platform will only copy the generic details or attributes of a process instance to the BAM repository, for example, start and end time of the process and the included activities, name of the process, organisation context, etc.).

In case you want to develop specific BAM measures with respect to the detailed data of the process, you need to follow a number of steps:

1. Create a service group and container based on the BAM application connector of the OTPS platform to manage the copying of the specific data of the process instance as saved in the Process Instance Manager (PIM) repository to the BAM repository.


2. Define with the business process model, what specific data you want to use while monitoring the performance of the process model. With the process model, you have a tab page Message Filter to specify what data of the process must be available for monitoring.


3. Create a PMO (Process Monitoring Object) defining which data from the PIM repository must be copied to the BAM repository. As soon as publish the PMO, the copying process will start and is maintained by the service container that you created in the first step.


4. Create any BAM business measure of type KPI (returns one single value) or type Graph (multi value result), KPI (Key performance indicator) or BER (Business Event Response) document.

 

Typically the BAM business measures contain two functional components:

1. The so-called composite control this is the measure component definition itself that you can drag and drop on a user interface to create a monitoring dashboard and show the value(s) of the measure in a gauge or graph.


2. A web service operation calculating the value(s) of the business measure. While developing you can immediately use the web service to test the business measure. In addition, you can use this web service in other reporting tools to retrieve the value(s) and use these for whatever reporting purpose.

As a guideline, you create a separate project i.e. OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) application to develop and deploy the relevant BAM components. This enables you to deploy the original application that is monitored separate from the monitoring application, which allows you to implement any modifications to the monitoring of the application without affecting the original application.

The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary contains a description of the important keywords and concepts of the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform. It is not meant to be a complete list but can help you to master and comprehend the most important concepts and technologies of the OTPS platform. You can also find a list of abbreviations below that are used with the descriptions of the listed keywords. 

List of abbreviations 

Abbreviation Description
 ANSI  American National Standards Institute
 BAM  Business Activity Monitoring
 BER  Business Event Response
 BPML  Business Process Modeling Language
 BPMN   Business Process Modeling Notation
 BPMS   Business Process Management Suite (or System)
 CAL   Composite Application Logging (framework)
 CAP  Cordys / Composite Application Package (file extension)
 CARS  Cordys Admin Repository Server
 CMC   Cordys Management Console
 CWS  Collaborative Work Space
 DTAP   Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production
 ESB   Enterprise Service Bus
 HW   HardWare
 IDE   Integrated Development Environment
 IP   Internet Protocol
 JVM   Java Virtual Machine
 KPI   Key Performance Indicator
 LDAP   Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
 OMG   Object Management Group
 OTPS   OpenText Process Suite
 PIM   Process Instance Manager
 PMO   Process Monitoring Object
 RDBMS   Relational DataBase Management System
 SCM   Software Configuration Management
 SCXML   State Chart XML
 SOA   Services Oriented Architecture
 SOAP   Simple Object Access Protocol
 SSU   State Sync-Up
 SVN   SubVersioN
 SW   SoftWare
 WfMC   Workflow Management Coalition
 WSDL   Web Service Definition Language
 XML   eXtensible Mark-up Language
 XPDL   XML Process Definition Language

 

Don't miss out on future blog posts! Subscribe to email updates today!

tech talk blog