Introduction

WebSphere Business Monitor, an integral part of IBM's business process management (BPM) portfolio, is a comprehensive business activity monitoring (BAM) solution that provides a near real-time view of your business performance. BAM can:

• Provide visibility into the performance of business activities by processing events, calculating business metrics, and presenting key performance indicators (KPIs) through business dashboards. Users can track current business performance against expectations, and analyze trends over time.
• Help when something goes wrong, and in situations where expectations are not met.
• Make the organization aware of potential problems much earlier. A directed action can be planned and carried out -- taking the right action at the right time.

WebSphere Business Monitor lets you understand business performance so you can compare performance with expected results. You can use the dashboards to see if KPIs are tracking to their desired targets, and to determine if you have any unforeseen bottlenecks in your business process, such as in activities involving human tasks. You can also use the actual historical results with other tools, such as WebSphere Business Modeler, to improve your business processes, allowing more accurate simulation of proposed changes.

This article gives an overview of some of the dramatic changes in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, a major product release offering new capability to do more with BAM, with faster time to value. Learn about:

• The new business user experience in Web 2.0 dashboards.
• A more flexible architecture for monitoring events.
• Iterative development and extensions to operating system and database support.

After highlighting the new capabilities, this article discusses changes that make the product much easier to use. The installation footprint is lighter, and you can do common tasks, such as product installation and deploying a monitor model, in fewer steps and in less time. Users of previous versions of WebSphere Business Monitor will be delighted by these changes.

Enhancements for business users: Dashboards

BAM solutions are usually deployed to give business users more visibility and insight into the performance of the business, and to let them take informed action. While BAM can sometimes cause actions to be taken automatically, the principal user interfaces for monitoring and action are the WebSphere Business Monitor dashboards.

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 offers two dashboard deployment choices: a portal-based dashboard, and a Web dashboard (without requiring portal). Both dashboards provide identical monitoring capabilities; the discussions below apply to both portal and Web dashboards.

Getting Started guide

In WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, the end-user experience has been revamped with an improved look and feel for higher responsiveness and ease of personalization. There is a new "Getting Started" guide installed in the dashboard environment. This collection of videos and instructional guidance is a convenient way to learn what you can accomplish using dashboards. Figure 1 shows the Getting Started main page with content areas to explore.

The Getting Started guide includes learning modules for eight of the most common tasks for end users with line of business responsibilities. It also demonstrates how power users can customize the BAM experience and create new KPIs. Users can navigate Getting Started through the tabs at the top of the page, or by clicking on the icons in the content areas.

Figure 2 shows an example of learning about the gauge visualization for KPIs. The display is active, showing a movie of the dashboard in action. The movie cycles through the aspects of KPI visualization, including display modes, getting access to greater details, and personalization.

Getting Started also gives users a way to learn progressively. As they begin to use KPIs and become comfortable with basic features, they can refer back to Getting Started to learn more.

Revamped visualizations with Web 2.0 foundation

In WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, the individual visual components in dashboards were redesigned with a new Web 2.0 foundation. As the Monitor Server processes events, dashboards are dynamically updated through a set of Representational State Transfer (REST) services. The dashboard visual items are implemented with Dojo and Ajax technology to provide a more visually appealing and responsive experience. For example, the display of KPIs and metrics on dashboard pages is automatically updated as events are processed. The minimum page refresh leads to a richer user experience with the new Web 2.0 dashboards.

A dashboard page is composed from a palette of dashboard views. With WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, creating a dashboard is a simple point-and-click or drag-and-drop operation. For example, you can create a Web dashboard by selecting New from the Web dashboard manager. You'll get an empty dashboard layout, and can then either click add-to-dashboard in the dashboard layout and choose a dashboard view from the drop-down list, or drag a dashboard view from the palette and drop it on the desired location in the layout.

Once a dashboard view is added to a dashboard page, it can be personalized. When personalizing a dashboard view, you bind the WebSphere Business Monitor data of interest, and configure the look-and-feel of the dashboard view.

A dashboard page can be created for personal use, ensuring the page is only visible to the creator. A dashboard can also be shared with a group of users. The Web dashboard manager provides a very simple user interface to make a dashboard page shared or personal. In the portal environment, you can use the portal administration utilities to make a page shared.

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 provides the following dashboard views:

KPIs

Shows the values of individual KPIs compared to the ranges and targets you’ve defined for your business. KPIs can be viewed using various forms of gauges, bar graphs, and tables.

Instances

Shows the details of activity and process instances, either individually or in groups. You can view both active and completed instances using different metric filters. You can use a time metric as a filter to control instance data to be displayed for a specific time interval.

Human Task

Provides metrics for work that people are performing within a process, helping to identify bottlenecks and enabling actions such as rebalancing workload. From the Human Task view, you can also perform a set of operations on the selected human tasks, such as claim a task or transfer a task to another user.

Diagram

A graphical depiction of flows and status of activities, such as a map or a process flow model. You can create virtually any visual diagram, and add metrics and KPI values. You can also visually change diagram shapes as events are processed.

Alerts

Displays or sends notifications to a specific user when business situations occur.

Report

Shows tables and graphs with analysis of performance across dimensions of your business relative to time periods (quarter, months, days, or hours).

Dimensions

Provides granular details that show how critical aspects of your business are performing. You can drill up or drill down from a dimension to understand a specific aspect of your business performance.

Figure 3 shows an example dashboard that combines human task instances with a visual diagram. The Human Tasks view has an Actions drop-down that lets you transfer work items, or suspend and resume work items. The diagram is updated dynamically to display metrics and KPIs, and change the appearance of shapes as business events are processed. Users can drag an item from the palette on the right and drop it on their page to construct a new dashboard.

An example of combining KPI gauges (left) with KPI tables (top right) and a Report (bottom right) is shown in Figure 4. This dashboard can be effective for understanding aggregated information about activity, for example averages and sums, and tracking those values across time.

Figure 5 shows an example dashboard page with a specialized diagram view. The diagram with a map of Canada has been annotated with colors and KPI values based on the information processed by the WebSphere Business Monitor server. The region in Canada including British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan is at 51% of plan, indicated by the orange color and the text box hovering over the region. The color of the regions and the KPI values are automatically updated as events are processed.

Embedded analytics

Figures 3, 4 and 5 are examples of dashboards that let business users see the performance of their businesses at the instance level (instance view and diagram view) and at the aggregated level (KPI view and diagram view). A business manager might also need to analyze the aggregated business result from different dimensions. For example, a bank manager wants to see the mortgage applications (total number of applications, total loan amount) by each loan officer, and the mortgage applications by the process state. The bank manager may also want to do multidimensional analysis by drilling down by each officer, and then by the process state, to find mortgage application values at different states for each loan officer. These analytic results can be reported using an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF file.

WebSphere Business Monitor provides embedded analytics through integration with DB2® Alphablox. The BAM data is published and cached through the Alphablox cubing server. A business user can then create a dashboard with the Dimension view and Report view to produce the analytic result and the required report.

Figure 6 shows examples of visualizations from Dimension and Report views provided by WebSphere Business Monitor.

Add and change KPIs

A key improvement in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 empowers business users in day-to-day operations with much less IT involvement. Business managers and executives are responsible for defining their business objectives, which can be measured in real time using KPIs in WebSphere Business Monitor. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 introduces KPI Manager, a new feature under the Utilities menu, as shown in Figure 7.

The KPI Manager allows an authorized user to create and change KPIs in a production system without IT involvement. Prior to WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, KPIs were created and changed using the Model Editor, then the corresponding WebSphere Business Monitor applications were deployed or redeployed by the IT department in an organization. Allowing a business user to define a KPI provides many benefits, such as a much shorter development life cycle. The information about business objectives is also kept within the realm of business users.

From the KPI Manager you can see that all the KPIs defined by developers are part of the original monitor models, called modeled KPIs. You can change the display name, target, and range, and the color and icons associated with each range, for the modeled KPIs.

You can also define new KPIs, known as dashboard KPIs. There is no deployment involved with the dashboard KPIs. After a dashboard KPI is defined, it becomes active and can be used in a dashboard immediately. A dashboard KPI can be created for personal use, and won't be visible to other people in your organization. A KPI can also be made shared if the owner of the KPI is a KPI administrator. When a new monitor model is deployed, the dashboard KPIs will automatically be merged with the new version of the monitor models. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 also provides a utility to transfer the dashboard KPIs to another WebSphere Business Monitor database.

An example of a business user extending monitoring capability through the KPI Manager involves adding new KPIs to the Global Human Task monitor model. This monitor model is part of the WebSphere Business Monitor server in 6.1. It contains over 20 common business metrics for all human tasks. Using these metrics, a business user can add specific KPIs for a particular human task.

Alerts and actions

Alerts are situations that require attention from a business user or notification to other external system. A WebSphere Business Monitor IT administrator can set up templates to define how each type of alert can be handled, such as dashboard, e-mail, cell, pager, Service Component Architecture (SCA) service, and Web service. A business user can subscribe to alerts to be delivered by dashboard, e-mail, cell, and pager.

Prior to WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, subscribing to alerts could only be performed by WebSphere Application Server administrators on behalf of the business user. A business user in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 can now subscribe to the business alerts and choose one or more delivery methods.

As shown in Figure 8, when alerts are delivered to business users by a dashboard, they can see the alerts from an Alert view. A business user can mark each alert as read or unread, and can also forward or remove an alert.

Role-based dashboard access

A WebSphere Business Monitor IT administrator can control access to dashboards based on the business user's role. Access can be specified on a model level. For example, a user can be a KPI administrator for one monitor model but have no access to another model. When binding a monitor model to a dashboard view, only the authorized monitor models will be made available to the business users. Operations such as modifying a shared KPI will be disabled for unauthorized business users.

Advanced integration with WebSphere Portal

Each WebSphere Business Monitor dashboard view can also be deployed as a portlet to WebSphere Portal. All the WebSphere Business Monitor portlets are in the portlet palette. With the significantly improved page creation interface in Portal 6.01, a business user can create a portal dashboard page by dragging the WebSphere Business Monitor portlet from the palette and dropping it to the desired area of a page. Each portlet can then be personalized, which involves binding the data to the dashboard view and configuring the visualization of the dashboard view. In the Portal environment, you can limit users to view access, and not allow them to change or personalize a dashboard view.

All the dashboards shown from Figure 3 to Figure 6 above can also be created as Portal dashboards. A Portal dashboard may contain visualizations (portlets) provided by WebSphere Portal, as well as custom portlets. When Portal Server is used, the dashboard utilities, such as the KPI Manager and Export Values, are also installed as portlets.

Figure 8 shows a Portal dashboard page with the WebSphere Business Monitor Alerts view and KPIs view. It also has a World Clock portlet and a Person Finder portlet. For customers who need to create custom monitor visualizations, or to combine visualization from other sources, WebSphere Portal provides a platform for rich dashboard customization.

Flexible business event and data processing: Monitor Server

The more activities that are available to observe and monitor, the more value you get from business activity monitoring. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 provides new ways of accessing more events and data, making KPIs and dashboards a more comprehensive representation of business performance. This section discusses changes in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 that are relevant to four categories of business activity to be monitored. These categories are often employed in combination.

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 brings two fundamental changes that lead to great flexibility in event processing:

XML best practices for event schema and runtime content

Prior to V6.1, WebSphere Business Monitor required that events be described using the Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) Event catalog format. This XML document is useful for describing event structures and field types, with specification of required and optional fields. The catalog XML was functional for the purpose, but it required you to use a special XML dialect just for event schema. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 provides a choice of using XSD (XML schema definition) for event schema, which has many benefits. Events can now be described using the same tools used for other aspects of SOA and BPM. If you've already defined XSD for business data that you want to pass in the body of a business event, you can simply reuse that XSD for purposes of business monitoring.

For example, if you have authored a BPEL application in WebSphere Integration Developer, with a business object representing a customer order, you can reuse that business object definition in your monitor model. You no longer have to keep two different format definitions in sync -- you have one format for both purposes. This also applies in cases where the customer uses the WebSphere Service Registry and Repository to enforce governance around things such as business object definitions. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository has native support for XSD, and its Eclipse plug-ins can be used in combination with the WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 toolkit to extract such XSDs from the repository and use as both inbound and outbound event definitions when authoring monitor models.

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 also allows XML document fragments to be used as the body or payload of the business event. Previously, events delivered at run time were required to be "shredded" into parent and child hierarchies as extendedDataElements, often requiring a special transformation step before the event could be emitted by the source application. With WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, business event payload data that's already in an XML document form can be placed into the business event without requiring shredding. This flexibility provides a much friendlier option for applications and middleware that can "speak XML."

Support for event sequencing

Asynchronous processing and network latencies can lead to cases where events arrive to WebSphere Business Monitor in an order that does not match the original sequence of business activity processing. For example, a simple order activity may have two events: one to signify order placement, and another to signify order fulfillment. In some cases, the order fulfillment event can arrive before the order placement event. Prior to WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, the monitor model developer and administrator were required to define emission of events to be ordered, usually by setting emission to be synchronous. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 introduces the capability to moderate the intake of events, performing a level of sequencing before the events are processed by monitor models.

Support for event sequencing opens up many new options for event emission. Since events can be now be emitted asynchronously, event sources that benefit from asynchronous processing (for example, enterprise service bus (ESB)) become natural sources for business events. Event producers now have the option of putting events directly onto the input JMS queue for CEI, including with queue connections from alternate JMS providers such as WebSphere MQ. And, administrators now have options such as clustering CEI and its messaging engine if desired, even with such asynchronously emitted events.

Monitor business processes

WebSphere Business Monitor is often used as part of a larger BPM solution, providing BAM capabilities for business processes executing in various run time environments. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 adds new capabilities to help keep monitor models synchronized with the applications being monitored. For example, you may need to change a business process after you've already invested in defining how that process should be monitored. With the new capabilities of the WebSphere Business Monitor toolkit, you can automatically refactor and synchronize your monitor model with the application being monitored. Table 1 shows the business process infrastructures supported by WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1.

Monitor business applications

In an SOA environment, oftentimes many of the services being aggregated into a composite business solution are hosted in remote, non-WebSphere-based infrastructures. In such cases, it is often desirable to communicate with such environments with WebSphere Adapters, which offer a wide range of connectors to many kinds of application hosting environments. It is usually best to expose adapter-based interactions as services exposed in an ESB. Some examples of such an approach are:

WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Adapters

WebSphere Business Monitor provides illustrations and starting point examples for monitoring the activity in business applications, such as SAP, by integrating with WebSphere Adapters and either WebSphere ESB or WebSphere Process Server. The WebSphere ESB encourages exposing services via the SCA programming model, and support is built into the WebSphere ESB to enable event emission containing input parameters to SCA services, and their return values.

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 also provides new support for invoking services exposed by the SCA programming model when business situations have been detected.

WebSphere Message Broker and Adapters

SupportPac IA9V provides a reusable Message Broker sub-flow for sending business events to WebSphere Business Monitor.

WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50

The DataPower XI50 appliance provides integration capability that can emit a business event for WebSphere Business Monitor to consume.

Monitor other business activity

In some cases, business activity is not yet naturally connected with a process server or an ESB. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 offers even more connectivity options:

• You can use WebSphere MQ as an on-ramp to send events to the WebSphere Business Monitor event infrastructure. WebSphere MQ has been used pervasively for years for various solutions, including application integration, B2B, and SOA connectivity. Many enterprises have existing WebSphere MQ environments and skills. With WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, a business event can now be placed onto a WebSphere MQ queue and processed by WebSphere Business Monitor.
• Another new means of delivering events to WebSphere Business Monitor is with environments using WS-Notification. A Web service can publish a business event as a notification message, and the application server can stream the message to the input JMS queue for CEI. The WebSphere Application Server Infocenter has information on using WS-Notification with CEI.
• The IBM Tivoli® portfolio of monitoring solutions has a broad reach and visibility to the various layers of IT architectures. For example, ITCAM for SOA can identify the source of bottlenecks or failures, and pinpoint services that use the most time or resources. This type of monitoring is complementary to WebSphere Business Monitor, which targets business level performance and is designed to run alongside the business interfaces used by business users (such as SAP, WebSphere Portal applications, and so on).

  ITCAM and WebSphere Business Monitor have introduced a point of integration between the products, providing you with new advantages. For example, if an IT resource or service problem is detected by ITCAM, an event can be sent from ITCAM to WebSphere Business Monitor and processed. If the event is found to be relevant to the performance of the business (for example, performance degradation is causing insurance claims processing to suffer and you need to add representatives to the call center), then WebSphere Business Monitor can alert the appropriate business user of the problem.

• For other cases, a simple Java event emitter interface is provided. As described earlier, WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 can use XSD to describe the event schema and XML documents to be used in the payload of events. These practices are also supported for custom Java event emitters.

Pull and augment business data with user-defined functions

In prior releases, the only way to monitor an environment was to have that environment push events to WebSphere Business Monitor. A major new capability in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 is the ability to pull data using user-defined XPath functions within map expressions, triggers, or other places where XPath is used within the WebSphere Business Monitor programming model. A customer can author a Java™ method that uses whatever API it desires (JDBC, JCA, SCA, REST, and so on) to communicate with a system being monitored, and then annotate that method (with Java 5 annotations), describing how it can be invoked as a new type of function available for use in XPath expressions (including being offered in content-assist when authoring such user-defined functions).

The two main uses for this new capability are:

• To augment data currently being delivered from events. For example, an event might include an employee's serial number, but not include sensitive information about that employee's hourly rate. With a user-defined XPath function, the cost of working on a given activity can be computed and stored to a metric.
• As part of a recurring time-based trigger, such as polling a system to see if a particular business situation has occurred. Such user-defined XPath functions can be used either from within (instance-level) monitoring contexts, or from within (aggregate-level) KPI contexts.

Iterative BAM design and development: Monitor Toolkit

The benefits from BAM are realized as business users gain insight and take actions to respond to opportunities and improve. Any BAM project must be enabled through activities such as project requirements gathering, design and development of monitor models, then testing and deploying the models. In version 6.1, the WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit brings major enhancements to speed the time to value across these project activities.

Authoring WebSphere Business Monitor models

With WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1, authoring a monitor model has been greatly simplified, with broader editor support, reduced steps for common tasks, and improved generation capability. This section highlights only three of the many authoring improvements in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1.

Because WebSphere Business Monitor is often used in combination with WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server, version 6.1 provides a much deeper level of integration. Perhaps the first noticeable change is the addition of monitor model templates for common monitoring scenarios. The templates can be applied to such WebSphere Integration Developer components as BPEL processes, human tasks, and WebSphere ESB mediation modules. Figure 9 shows an example of templates being applied for monitoring a BPEL process. You can choose to add metrics and KPIs to calculate the durations of processing, and to track the current state of processes and activities.

When a developer or team of developers are using WebSphere Integration Developer to simultaneously create an application and a monitor model for that application, WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 offers new refactoring and synchronization features. Many changes made to the WebSphere Integration Developer application will trigger corresponding monitor model changes to be made.

The Visual Model editor is another new feature in the WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit. Figure 3 and Figure 5 are example dashboards containing annotated diagrams. With this editor you define how a diagram is associated with a set of shapes, and a set of actions, describing how and when the diagram will be modified based on the values of metrics or KPIs. Figure 10 shows an example use of the Visual Model editor. A developer is unit testing the display with a sample data set. After making changes to your visual model, you can add sample data to test the diagrams from right inside the WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit. You can also check the return values of visual model expressions to make sure they're working as you intended.

Unit testing with integrated Monitor Server

The WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit also offers:

Unit test server

The Monitor toolkit has more than an editor for the monitor model XML file -- it also provides a unit test environment. In the unit test environment you can test out your monitor model in an embedded server environment to see if it properly reacts to events by storing the right data and taking the right actions.

The unit test server is actually a full WebSphere Business Monitor server, running in a specially created profile that has been marked as developmentMode=true in its server.xml. It offers certain "fast-path" options, such as auto-creating tables and auto-registering cubes. This mode will also quickly clean out potentially invalid data from previous iterations, thus avoiding the complexities associated with a multi-version environment. (During iterative development you want to quickly try out changes and move on, without needing to involve a database administrator or a WebSphere administrator.)

The unit test server, which uses the Derby Embedded database that is a part of WebSphere (you don't need a separately installed database in order to do basic testing of your monitor model), is controlled by the standard mechanisms as provided in Rational® Application Developer V7 or WebSphere Integration Developer V6.1. The Add/Remove Projects wizard, the ability to run projects from the workspace, and ability to republish such projects as you make changes are included.

Integrated test client

An important new feature is the ability to compose and send events from within the IDE. You can test that your monitor model correctly processes events, without having to actually execute your application being monitored. A basic form-based graphical interface lets you fill in values for each field of the event according to its XSD, enforcing that data of the proper type is entered for each field, and offering assistance such as a popup calendar for fields of type dateTime.

As shown in Figure 11, the integrated test client allows you to: build up scripts of events (including pauses), export and import such scripts, and re-order and re-edit the events within the script. It's now easy to build up libraries of event data that can be easily resubmitted, such as when testing a change to a monitor model.

Integrated dashboards

This critical new feature provides full support for all dashboard views within the IDE's embedded browser using the new non-Portal-based dashboard option. Just like you can launch the Admin console or the CBE browser from the popup menu for the unit test server, you can also launch the Web dashboards to run within a tab in the IDE. You have the full capabilities of the dashboards, as when used in a production environment, including the dimensional analysis views, annotated SVG diagrams, alerts, and all the other capabilities of the WebSphere Business Monitor dashboards. During iterative development, you can quickly make changes to your monitor model, republish the results to the unit test server, and immediately see the results in the dashboards.

Optional: Developing custom BAM interfaces

WebSphere Business Monitor provides several dashboard views you can use for a wide range of business dashboard requirements. The views can be personalized for appearance and behavior. In some cases, an organization may have very specialized requirements for accessing and using the BAM data that was processed and calculated by the WebSphere Business Monitor server. To better support these cases, WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 offers two new ways to access BAM data.

• One new access mechanism is based completely on a Web 2.0 approach. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 publishes a set of REST services for accessing the metadata and data values. Consistent with the REST architecture pattern, each service is identified through a URI. For example, to retrieve a list of KPIs, you could use the URI in the form of "/models/model_ID/versions/version_ID/kpis." These REST services use the data interchange format called JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) for representing the payload of information exchanged.

  Listing 1 shows a sample of the JSON object fields returned from the request for the list of KPIs.

  
  
  Listing 1
  

  [ --- KPI array { -- 1ST KPI "KPI ID": "kpi id1", "Model ID": "model1", "Version": "1234556", "KPI Display Name": "kpi name", "KPI Origin": "modeled", "User ID": "user 1" "KPI Context ID": "context id1" "KPI Description": "sample KPI Data" "KPI Data Type": "duration" "Target": 123344 "Target Localized": "xxxxxxxxxxxx" "KPI Calc Method": "aggregated" "Aggregated Metric ID": "metric ID" "Aggregated Metric Name": "metric name 1" "Aggregated Function": "avg" "Version Aggregation": "allVersions" "View Access": "public" }, { -- 2nd KPI } ]

  
  

  The reference section of the WebSphere Business Monitor Information Center has a full reference for each of the REST services, including the URI, parameters, and sample JSON object output.

• A second new way to access BAM data from WebSphere Business Monitor is a point of integration with a complementary product called WebSphere Portlet Factory. The WebSphere Business Monitor Data Access Builder for Portlet Factory is available as a Web download from the IBM SOA Business Catalog.

  The Data Access Builder allows you, using Portlet Factory, to easily retrieve WebSphere Business Monitor metadata and data values. Once the builder is installed into the Portlet Factory development tool, you can combine the range of Factory visual builders with the data from WebSphere Business Monitor. For example, you can create a custom portlet to visualize a KPI calculated by WebSphere Business Monitor, and deploy that portlet alongside one of the portlets installed by WebSphere Business Monitor. Data Access Builder can also be used with the WebSphere Dashboard Framework, which is a superset of Portlet Factory, adding hi-fidelity charting to your toolbox for creating customer interfaces.

Simplified deployments: Installation and administration

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 installation is consistent with other related products. Administrative tasks have also been streamlined and automated.

Consistency

The WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 installer focuses on consistency and reliability, giving you a good installation experience.

Users of WebSphere Application Server 6.1 and related products will notice that the look and feel, navigation, and panel design in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 is consistent with WebSphere Application Server 6.1. From the welcome page to the First Steps dialog, users are not required to learn a new approach for installation. Likewise, maintenance on the WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 server will be performed using the same Update Installer that's used with WebSphere Application Server 6.1.

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 supports consistent WebSphere profile management for WebSphere Business Monitor server configurations. Tasks such as creating or augmenting a deployment manager profile, or a standalone application server profile, are performed using the same WebSphere profile management tool that's used with WebSphere Application Server 6.1.

On the authoring side, the WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit has been designed for consistency with other development tools, such as Rational Application Developer 7.0 and WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1. Both of those tools have adopted a common installation approach with the IBM Installation Manager. The result is a common look and feel, and a common approach for problem determination and uninstall.

Range of installation scenarios

A highlight of WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 is a reduction in the footprint of required software. In version 6.0.2, a WebSphere Business Monitor server installation always required DB2, DB2 Alphablox, DB2 Cube Views, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Portal, and an LDAP server. Now, the only mandatory prerequisite is WebSphere Application Server 6.1. You can still choose to install DB2, DB2 AlphaBlox and WebSphere Portal if your project requires the advanced capability. DB2 Cube Views is no longer used by WebSphere Business Monitor, and is not part of the installation experience.

As with 6.0.2, the WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 server install still has the choice of a basic or advanced installation path. With basic, the installation program uses common default options and installs the prerequisite software on behalf of the user. The basic installation is a quick and easy way to install a single WebSphere Business Monitor server topology.

The advanced path is used for the typical production-style topologies where WebSphere Business Monitor components are distributed to different servers.

Support for broader operating environments

WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 provides expanded support for operating systems and database platforms. Additional key operating system support includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux™, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and HP-UX® Itanium.

Key WebSphere Business Monitor server supported database platforms are DB2 for z/OS, Oracle 10g Standard and Enterprise, Derby Embedded (for non-production usage only), and version 9.1 of DB2 workstation.

First steps

A popular new feature to be used immediately after installation is the First steps console. As shown in Figure 12, the First steps console includes a list of actions and resources to help accelerate your BAM project.

Two of the First steps items are completely new in WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1:

• The installation verification utility can help identify any possible installation problems before continuing with the project. The utility deploys a monitor model and processes events through the model to exercise much of the WebSphere Business Monitor server function. If this verification passes successfully, you can then proceed with installing monitor models and configuring the WebSphere Business Monitor server.
• The Migration Wizard can be used to migrate data and models from WebSphere Business Integration Monitor v4.2.4 and WebSphere Business Monitor 6.0.2. The wizard walks an administrator through the steps of migrating and verifying the updated resources on WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1.

Summary

Table 2 summarizes the highlights of WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 across four primary categories.

Subsequent articles in this series will cover the WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 capabilities in depth, showing how to put them into action using our mortgage lending business scenario. Before that, though, Part 2 will discuss the improvements in WebSphere Business Monitor installation. Stay tuned to learn more about its significant transformation and how consumability has drastically improved.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 development leads for their innovation and commitment, without whom this work would not be possible: Arvind Srinivasan, Christina Watkins, Clayton Sims, Curtis Miles, Dan Willey, David Enyeart, Jim Thorpe, Nick Metianu, Paritosh Patel, Ramiah Tin, Stephanie L Walter, and Wilfred C Jamison.

Resources

Learn

• Browse the WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 Information Center for more details and reference material.
  
  
• The WebSphere Application Server Infocenter has information on using WS-Notification with CEI.
  
  
• Learn more about WebSphere Portlet Factory and WebSphere Dashboard Framework, a superset of Portlet Factory.
  
  
• "Leveraging the new Ajax features in IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory V6.0.1" (developerWorks, Nov 2007) has more about WebSphere Portlet Factory, which can be used to develop new user interfaces using Monitor REST interfaces.
  
  
• The FileNet P8 v.4.0 documentation Administration section describes how to enable and use FileNet P8 with WebSphere Business Monitor.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• SupportPac IA9V provides a reusable Message Broker sub-flow for sending business events to WebSphere Business Monitor.
  
  

Discuss

• Participate in the discussion forum.
  
  

About the authors

Eric Wayne is the lead architect for business activity monitoring (BAM), WebSphere Business Monitor development lead, and a core member of the IBM Software Group Architecture Board.

John Alcorn is currently a lead architect for the IBM Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Platform. He has worked as a software engineer with IBM for the previous 14 years, with more than 10 years on WebSphere products, including both product development and software services. For the past two years he served as the chief programmer for the WebSphere Business Monitor product, including working closely with the IBM WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) team. John is IBM-certified in Administration for WebSphere Application Server, Network Deployment V6.

Victor Chan is a senior technical staff member and lead architect for WebSphere Business Activity Monitor (BAM) Dashboard and Web Interface development. Prior to joining the BAM team, Victor was the lead architect for WebSphere Commerce server development, where he led the transformation of Commerce Server from a C++ to a J2EE implementation. Victor’s experience includes J2EE, SOA, BPM, and BAM. He also has vast experience in industry solutions with the distribution sector. His current focus is on advanced business user tooling for BAM using Web 2.0, and advance BAM capabilities including Predictive Analytic and Human-Centric BPM.

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Table of contents

• Introduction
• Enhancements for business users
• Flexible business event and data processing: Monitor Server
• Iterative BAM design and development: Monitor Toolkit
• Simplified deployments: Installation and administration
• Summary
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments