 | Level: Introductory Eric Wayne (ewayne@us.ibm.com), WebSphere Business Monitor Overall Lead, IBM
John Alcorn (jalcorn@us.ibm.com), Senior Software Engineer, IBM
Victor Chan (victor@ca.ibm.com), Senior Technical Staff Member,
IBM
21 Dec 2007 Learn about the dramatic changes in IBM® WebSphere®
Business Monitor 6.1—a major release that extends capability, and
simplifies how you monitor and manage the performance of your business.
In this article, tour the highlights of the business user experience in Web
2.0 dashboards, and the more flexible architecture for monitoring events. Also learn about iterative development, and simplified installation and
administration. Future articles in this series will cover the new capabilities in depth by showing how to put them into action using a mortgage lending scenario. Part 2 will discuss improvements in WebSphere Business Monitor installation.
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.
| |
The WebSphere Business Monitor Information Center and other Resources
have details and reference material. |
|
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.
Figure 1. New Getting Started guide
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.
Figure 2. KPIs - Getting Started
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.
Figure 3. Operations dashboard
layout
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 4. Aggregated dashboard
layout
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.
Figure 5. Dashboard with annotated
map diagram
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.
Figure 6. Embedded analytics
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.
Figure 7. KPI Manager
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.
Figure 8. Portal-based dashboard
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.
Table 1. Business process infrastructures supported by WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1
| Infrastructure | Description |
|---|
| WebSphere Process Server | When integrated with WebSphere Integration
Developer and WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Business Monitor can track the
activity of the full range of components running in WebSphere Process Server.
Prior releases could only monitor a subset of the various types of components
supported by WebSphere Process Server; WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 supports the full set of
Service Component Architecture (SCA) component kinds, including new support for
business state machines and business rules. Support for
monitoring of human tasks has been improved, including a new dashboard view
specifically devoted to status and actions you can take upon human
tasks running in WebSphere Process Server.
| | WebSphere Business Services Fabric | Exploits the underlying
WebSphere Process Server capability for sending business events to WebSphere Business Monitor. You
can use WBSF to assemble and manage composite business applications in a dynamic
fashion, and use the same BAM capability as with other WebSphere Process Server applications. | | FileNet P8 | The
FileNet P8 v4.0 documentation (see Resources)
explains how to enable FileNet P8 processes for event emission
and business monitoring. FileNet P8 includes a monitor model that can be used to
calculate metrics and track the flow of P8 processes. This monitor model can be
imported into the WebSphere Business Monitor Toolkit for customization as needed. | | WebSphere MQ Workflow | WebSphere Business Monitor now provides
first-class support for monitoring WebSphere MQ Workflow processes. Migration
tools are also provided for the benefit of WebSphere Business Monitor v4.2.4 customers. Because WebSphere Business
Monitor 6.1 provides support for monitoring WebSphere MQ Workflow, such
customers can upgrade and experience all the benefits of this new release.
Customers can migrate both their prior v4.2.4 monitor models and
the data collected by such models into the 6.1 environment. |
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.
Figure 9. WebSphere Business Monitor model
generation
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.
Figure 10. Visual Model editor
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.
Figure 11. Integrated test client
- 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.
Figure 12. WebSphere Business Monitor First steps
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.
Table 2. WebSphere Business Monitor 6.1 highlights
| 6.0.2 | 6.1 Highlights |
|---|
| Business user experience | Limited range of personalization options. | Empowers the line of business through enhanced capability:
- Visualization revamped with Web 2.0 technology to improve look and feel,
responsiveness, and to support deeper personalization.
- Getting Started and progressive learning.
- New visualization for human tasks.
|
|---|
| Business event and data processing | WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere ESB and "roll your own" emitters. | Easier access to activity in the business:
- Added WebSphere ESB/Adapters, FileNet, WebSphere MQ Workflow.
- Support for WebSphere MQ as event on-ramp.
- Ability to pull data through user-defined functions.
|
|---|
| Iterative BAM design and development | Simple generation for WebSphere Process Server - one module per monitor model.
Unit test with simple metric viewer.
| Much faster creation of monitor models:
- Generation is patterned for WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere ESB. Flexible module and model relationship.
- Expanded SCA support, refactoring and synchronization with WebSphere Integration Developer models.
- Simplified and extended editor support (no more XML editing).
- Integrated test client provides scripting for event emission.
- No manual steps - fast deployment. KPIs can be added/changed by
business users in the dashboard environment, reducing number of deployment
iterations.
- Full range of dashboard views available for unit test.
- REST interfaces for access to KPIs and metrics, allowing for
custom dashboards.
- WebSphere Dashboard Framework builder for custom dashboards.
|
|---|
| Installation and administration | Portal and Alphablox always required.
Support for DB2 only.
Windows and AIX
only. | Lowers the overall costs of BAM deployment:
- Consistent installation with other related products.
- Choices in topology: Lightweight Dashboard Configuration, Lightweight
Dashboard + Alphablox (The UTE), Portal Dashboard, Portal Dashboard +
Alphablox.
- Added support for Oracle, DB2 on z/OS; Added Linux x86.
- Administrative tasks streamlined and automated.
|
|---|
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
Get products and technologies
- Download the WebSphere Business Monitor Data
Access Builder from the
IBM SOA Business Catalog.
-
SupportPac IA9V provides a reusable Message Broker sub-flow for sending business events to WebSphere Business Monitor.
Discuss
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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