Key technical concepts
Key technical concepts for modeling, monitoring, analyzing, and improving the performance of your business include monitor models, monitoring contexts, key performance indicator (KPI) contexts, business measures (which include metrics and KPIs), and triggers.
- monitor models
- A monitor model is a container that holds information about the business performance management aspects of a business model, including the business measures that are required for monitoring. The IBM® Business Monitor user decides which processes to monitor, whether to monitor their subprocesses, and what business measures to use. The user then generates a monitor model based on the process.
- contexts
- Monitor models contain contexts, which define the information
to be collected at run time. Each monitor model contains at least
one monitoring context. The monitoring context defines all of the
information that should be collected about an entity (such as a specific
process, the state of a specific customer order, or the stock level
of an item in a warehouse) as the system is running. The monitoring
context also contains the metrics, counters, and stopwatches for holding
the information.
KPI contexts are optional. The KPI context defines all of the data that should be collected about a KPI or set of related KPIs. You can nest monitoring contexts, but you cannot nest KPI contexts.
- monitoring context instances
- A monitoring context instance is a single instance of the information (metrics) collected in a monitoring context. A monitoring context instance is commonly referred to as an instance.
- triggers
- A trigger is a mechanism that detects an occurrence and can cause additional processing in response. For example, you could define a trigger that causes a metric to be updated, a counter to be incremented, or a stopwatch to be halted each time a task ends. Triggers also determine when outbound events are sent.
- alerts
- An alert defines specific business situations and send notifications to call attention to urgent or important matters. For example, you can specify inventory levels and have notifications sent when the levels fall below a certain threshold.
- reports
- Reports are used to display multidimensional business performance data in the form of charts and tables.
- business measures
- Business measures describe the performance management aspects
of your business that are required for real-time business monitoring.
When you want to monitor a certain area of your business to assess
its efficiency, identify problems, and improve performance, you must
first determine the performance indicators that will give you the
information you need. These performance indicators include metrics,
KPIs, counters, and stopwatches.
Evaluating the business measures of your processes is crucial for achieving your business objectives. The values of these business measures can provide extensive information about performance.
- KPIs
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)
are quantifiable measurements of the improvement or deterioration
in the performance of an activity critical to the success of a business.
You can use them to measure essential activities of your business
so that you can see how these activities influence business results.
KPIs are typically aggregations of values across many instances, where the aggregation function can be average, maximum, minimum, sum, count (number of occurrences), or standard deviation. For example, in a call center, the timely answering of customer calls is a key business activity. A KPI could be Average time for response to a customer call for the last 30 days. This KPI could have a target of less than one minute. KPIs can also be based on expressions; for example, a Profit KPI could be a Revenue KPI minus an Expenses KPI.
- metrics
- A metric is a holder for information, typically a business performance measurement, in a monitoring context. A metric can be used to define the calculation for a key performance indicator (KPI), which measures performance against a business objective.
- counters and stopwatches
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) often depend on elapsed time, or on the number of occurrences of some situation or event. Stopwatches are specialized metrics that keep track of elapsed time, such as the time since the order-processing process started. Counters are specialized metrics that count occurrences, such as the number of instances of the order-processing process per day.
The way you define metrics and KPIs depends on which products you are monitoring. For example, if you are using IBM Process Designer with IBM Business Process Manager, you can select the metrics and KPIs as part of a business process definition (BPD). You can also define metrics, KPIs, counters, and stopwatches in the Monitor Model editor in IBM Integration Designer. KPIs can also be created or further defined in the dashboards. Metrics and KPIs are then evaluated and measured by IBM Business Monitor.