Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

In this section, the following is discussed:

• What's the purpose of BAM Data Monitoring
• Setting up a BAM Data Monitor

What's the purpose of BAM Data Monitoring

The BAM portal in BizTalk360 allows business users to query BAM views, perform activity searches, view the user permissions, and the activities time window. The business users can set up specific data points during the business process that will give them an insight to what is happening in the course of the process. Let's assume the scenario - a purchase manager is keen to know how many Purchase Orders are approved and denied every day between 9 AM and 5 PM. In real time, the manager is forced to run the query in the BAM portal in BizTalk360 to know these results. BizTalk360 offers the added functionality to business users where they can set up data monitors that will automatically execute the query at specific time intervals and get notified about the status. This saves time for the business users as they no longer have to manually set up queries on BAM views/activities to view the results.

Setting up a BAM Data Monitor

Follow the steps as shown below to create a BAM Data Monitoring alarm:

• In case you did not do it earlier, follow the steps as mentioned in this section to create a Data Monitoring alarm
• Select the 'Use this alarm for Data Monitor Alerts' check box to map the current alarm to Data Monitors. Only when this option is selected, the 'Notify on Success as well' check box gets activated.
• The 'Notify on Success as well' check box is optional for Data Monitoring, while the Use this alarm for Data Monitor Alerts option is mandatory
• Click OK to save the alarm information

1. Choose Alarm - As mentioned above, the first step to set up BAM Data Monitoring is to create an alarm. Once you have created the alarm, the alarm name will be displayed in the drop down. Select the alarm that should be used for BAM data monitoring purposes
2. Friendly Monitor Name - A meaningful name for the BAM Data Monitor. The monitor name can be set as "BAM Data Monitor for PO received every 15 minutes from 9 AM to 5 PM"
3. BAM View - This section is very similar to the Business Activity Monitoring section in BizTalk360. Select the BAM View and Activity for which you want to run the data monitor
4. Add a filter - To filter the query results based on different parameters (available columns in the BAM view)
5. Warning Threshold - Select the value from the drop down on when you want to be notified when there is a warning. The first drop down is to select the Operator (> or =) and the second operator is to select the warning value. For e.g., When number of BAM activities are > 5, throw a warning
6. Error Threshold - Select the value from the drop down on when you want to be notified when there is an error. The first drop down is to select the Operator (> or =) and the second operator is to select the warning value. For e.g., When number of BAM activities are > 10, throw an error
7. How often you want to monitor - Select the duration how often you want to monitor for BAM status reports. The options are - Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. Depending on the selection, you can add further filter criteria on how often you want to monitor

• Daily - will set up the data monitor to execute everyday
• Weekly - The data monitor will execute on the selected days of the week (Every Day, Monday-Friday, or the selected day of choice). To add a single day of the week, click the control and select the day of your choice
• Monthly - The data monitor will execute on the selected day of the month. To add a specific day of the month, enter the date in the space provided or select the date from the drop down If a particular day is not present in the month (say, 29th Feb), then system will skip that month and generate the results on the specified day in the next month

8. When during the day - Select the time when the data monitor must execute on a particular day during the business hours. You can customize your business hours by selecting the values from the Business Day Start and Business Day End options By default, the business day start time is 9 AM and business day end time is 5 PM. Depending on the business hour selection, the following options are available when you want the data monitor to execute on a particular day.
9. At what time - Select the time when the data monitor should execute on a particular day. The options are - At the end of the business day and at a set frequency (every 1 hour or 15 minutes)

• At the end of the business day - If this option is chosen, the data monitor will execute depending on the value chosen in the Business Day End field. For e.g, if the business end time specified is 5 PM (default value), the data monitor will execute exactly at 5 PM
• Monitor every X minutes/hours - You can define specific intervals during the business hours when the data monitor should execute. The options available are Minutes and Hours
  • Minutes - Select the number of minutes after which the data monitor should execute. E.g., 30 minutes means the data monitor will execute once in every 30 minutes The minimum time interval supported is 15 minutes, which means the data monitor will execute 4 times (15 minutes x 4 = 60 minutes) in an hour.
  • Hours - Select the number of hours after which the data monitor should execute during the business hours. E.g., 2 hours means the data monitor will execute once in 2 hours between 9 AM and 5 PM The minimum time interval supported is 1 hour.

10. Advanced - This section can be used to define advanced settings for data monitoring. You can define a date range (from date and to date) when you want the data monitor to execute. You can set up a data monitor to start, say, on a Monday and end on the next Tuesday. In addition to this, you can set up the other settings mentioned above in the previous steps. This means the data monitor will only start to run next Monday and will not execute after Tuesday By default, the Advanced section will be in Collapsed state. Click the '>' button to expand the Advanced section and make the settings.
11. How do you want to check

• Based on only Query result count (no date/time filter) - Selecting this option will execute the query based on the setting for trigger time (Defined under 'At what time' as explained above in step 10). Say, the monitor at set frequency is set to every 15 minutes, the query execution will happen once in every 15 minutes till the specified end time
• Based on Query result with date/time range - Selecting this option will activate the "Choose date/time column" drop down from where the appropriate option can be selected. When selected, the query will be constructed with the from/to date time filter based on the selected date/time column, and execute the query with the time range. Say, for instance, if the data monitor is scheduled to execute every hour from 9 AM to 6 PM, and currently the time is 11:59 AM, during the next run of the data monitor at 12 PM, it will look for the query results between 11:01 AM and 11:59 AM and generate the results

12. Summary - The summary information will automatically be populated based on the information selected in the previous columns
13. Save & Close - Once all the values are selected in the previous steps, click Save & Close to save the settings
14. Save & Add Another - The entered values will be saved and a new screen will be displayed to create another data monitor
15. Close - Click Close to discard the changes. When the close button is clicked, system will display a confirmation message as "There are unsaved changes, do you still want to close?". Click Yes to close the Data Monitoring creation window. Click No to remain on the same page
16. General guideline - Provides information about the operations that can be performed in the current screen