Business activity monitoring

Business activity monitoring (BAM) refers to a category of software that aids the monitoring and tracking of business activities implemented within computer systems.

The term was originally coined by analysts at Gartner, Inc. and refers to the aggregation, analysis, and presentation of real-time information regarding activities within organizations, customers, and partners. A business activity may either represent a business process that is orchestrated by a business process management (BPM) software, or it may encompass a series of activities that span multiple systems and applications. BAM is specifically designed to provide operations managers and upper management with a comprehensive overview of business activities.

Description

Business activity monitoring software provides real-time information regarding the status and results of various operations, processes, and transactions. The main benefits of BAM are that it enables an enterprise to make more informed business decisions, quickly address problem areas, and re-position organizations to take full advantage of emerging opportunities.

One of the most prominant features of BAM is the presentation of information via dashboards that contain the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to provide assurance and visibility of activity and performance. This information is used by technical and business operations to provide insights, measurements, and assurances regarding key business activities. Additionally, it can be utilized by event correlation to detect and warn against impending problems.

While BAM systems typically utilize a computer dashboard display to present data, BAM is distinct from the dashboards used by business intelligence (BI) systems, as events are processed in real-time or near real-time and subsequently pushed to the dashboard in BAM systems. BI dashboards, however, refresh at predetermined intervals through polling or querying of databases. Depending on the selected refresh interval, BAM and BI dashboards may be similar or vary considerably.

Certain products offer trouble notification functionalities, enabling them to interact directly with the issue tracking system. For example, entire groups of people can be sent e-mails, as well as voice or text messages, according to the nature of the problem. Where feasible, automated problem solving can correct and restart failed processes.

Processing events

While early technology processed events emitted as the process was being orchestrated, this had the disadvantage of requiring enterprises to invest in BPM before being able to acquire and use BAM. The newer products are based on complex event processing (CEP) technology, and can process high volumes of underlying technical events to derive higher level business events, therefore reducing the dependency on BPM, and providing BAM to a wider audience of customers.

Examples

A bank may be interested in minimizing the amount of capital it borrows overnight from a central bank. Interbank transfers must be communicated and arranged through automation by a set time each business day. The failure of any vital communication could cost the bank large sums of interest charged by the central bank. A system would be programmed to become aware of each message and await confirmation. Failure to receive confirmation within a reasonable amount of time would be grounds to raise an alarm that would set in motion a manual intervention to investigate the delay's cause and push the problem toward resolution before it becomes costly.

Another example involves a mobile telecommunications company interested in detecting a situation whereby new customers are not set up promptly and correctly on their network and within customer relationship management and billing systems. Low-level technical events such as messages passing from one application to another over a middleware system, or transactions detected within a database log file, are processed by a CEP engine. All events relating to an individual customer are correlated in order to detect an anomalous situation whereby an individual customer has not been promptly or correctly provisioned, or set up. An alert can be generated to notify technical operations or to notify business operations, and the failed provisioning step may be restarted automatically.

Related fields

• Business service management
• Business intelligence (BI)
• Business process management (BPM)
• User activity monitoring