iWay Business Activity Monitoring
By Inessa Gerber
iWay Business Activity Monitor (BAM) enables end-to-end transaction monitoring as it flows through iWay Service Manager (iSM). It provides non-invasive views into the automated business process, capturing and aggregating business and system-level events.
The transaction events are automatically captured and stored in the configured datastore. User-defined metrics are stored, aggregated and made available to the application for alert generation and dashboards. BAM is comprised of an activity driver capturing data as it flows through the system and a Web Application providing a BAM user console. The BAM console hosted by iWay enables a unified view into business activity, dashboards, correlation, and alert generation. Console access is based on user credentials and role as configured by the Administrator. This enables secure shared environment for multiple users.
Activity Management
As transactions flow through the iSM channel, BAM captures the transaction data with no interference into the business process. The BAM driver runs in parallel to the channel, providing a non-invasive data capture. Transaction information ranges from simple transaction state such as success, fail, warning, to step-by-step transaction history details containing information on each step of any given transaction.
This fine-grain event capture enables easy view into transaction history. Channel activity view of the BAM Activity Console presents the overall state of the transaction as well as its detailed history and context (Screen 1). The Transaction History view provides detailed information for the transaction process. The Transaction Context view provides the current view into general environment context available for a specific step of the process.
Screen 1
Activity Monitoring provides a unified view into EDI-specific activity in EDI the Activity Console, enabling the business user to view any unsettled transactions. The EDI Activity (Screen2) provides an overall state of the transaction as well as the acknowledgement status. EDI information is captured automatically based on the configured EDI ebix on an EDI Channel within iSM. The Transaction History provides a detailed view into EDI transaction lifespan, including any parsing, rule violations and outbound processing. The actual incoming transaction is accessible from the console under the Message column and can be edited and resubmitted from the console.
For a non-EDI transaction exchange between partners, a Partner Activity view provides an overall transactions state based on the inbound or outbound partner information. The transaction history and context are available for all Activity Management. Transactions are linked together via a unique transaction identifier (TID) enabling BAM to link transactions from channel to partner to EDI processing.
Screen 2
Correlation Management
Correlation management enables the tracking of transaction across multiple channels. Transactions are correlated as a standalone transaction or as part of a set. Set correlation plays a role during batch processing where each transaction is correlated to a specific batch correlation set. The transaction correlation state is updatable at any point of the process. This enables the transaction to be processed by multiple channels where each channel can update the transaction state. Transaction overall state is denoted as open or closed.
Transaction Details provide the transaction correlation history from the initial open state to various functional, business or customized transaction updates (Screen 3). This is a key feature enabling the user to track the transaction through all correlation steps and identify actions performed by any given channel on a transaction.
Screen 3
Metrics for Dashboards and Alerts
Business Activity Monitor enables the capture of various user-defined metric values. The aggregated metric values are used to display information in dashboards providing a visual representation of valuable business data. The metrics captured are defined in special registers within the business process flow. The captured metrics can be used to track performance indicators, business processes, sales, and any other comparative information that can be presented in a dashboard.
BAM-created dashboards use metric values with the aggregated function to display data (Screen 4). In addition, dashboards can display personalized sites integrated via a URL link. This URL-based integration enables the integration with other monitoring tools.
Screen 4
Captured metric values can also be used to generate alerts based on a configured constraint. Defined constraints in BAM have the ability to check on the metric value on a specified time interval, generating alerts based on condition. The alert event is stored, processed and, if configured to do so, an e-mail notification is send. Alert generation can range from a simple warning event that performance of any given channel fell below the threshold, to a business error alert that balance fell below the threshold, or any other conditions configured for a constraint.
