Comprehensive business environment

IBM® Business Monitor provides real-time business activity monitoring for your business processes, regardless of where those processes run. You can use IBM Business Monitor dashboards to visualize your business performance. The dashboards can display data at both the individual instance level and at the aggregate level and can offer sophisticated dimensional analysis.

You can also be alerted if any key performance indicators (KPIs) go outside of their range or are predicted to do so based on current trends. For example, if you manage a team that processes insurance claims, you might want to know whether claims are being handled within the appropriate time frame. You can define KPIs to track the average time for claim processing and be alerted when a claim falls outside the range.

You can view business performance information through the Monitor dashboard and through various devices.

Viewing Monitor dashboards

Using a dashboard, you can view business performance data in various graphical formats.

You can display one or more uniquely configured widgets on a page and group pages into one or more spaces.

IBM Business Monitor provides widgets that you can use to configure your dashboards. You can also create custom widgets for specific business needs. The following widgets are provided with IBM Business Monitor:

Table 1. Widgets for business monitoring
Widget name	Description
Alerts	Displays notifications for specific business situations that were defined by an administrator or a business user to call attention to urgent or important matters.
Diagrams	Displays a diagram or other visual representation of a business process.
Instances	Displays the values for individual data constructs in the business process.
KPI History and Prediction	Displays the historical values of a KPI in a graph. The widget also shows predicted KPI values.
KPIs	Displays a graphic, such as a gauge or table, that dynamically shows the performance of a business process.
Report Viewer	Displays multidimensional business performance data in the form of charts and tables.

Table 2. Widgets for business monitoring tools
Widget name	Description
Alert Manager	Allows users to create alerts directly from the dashboard and manage how alerts are received.
KPI Manager	Allows users with the appropriate role settings to create KPIs.
Report Designer	Allows users to design reports that contain selected data from monitored business activities.

You can also have dashboards automatically generated when you deploy a monitor model, instead of configuring the dashboards manually. When you select the option to automatically generate dashboards, the following widgets are available as soon as the model is deployed:

Alerts widget
Diagrams widget
Instances widget
KPI widget
Report Viewer widget

Dashboards interact with IBM Business Monitor database REST services to retrieve all the required information for dashboard items.

Viewing data from other devices

In addition to viewing dashboards in IBM Business Monitor, you can use other mechanisms to monitor your business data:

You can view business data from your smartphone. For example, you can use the native application of IBM Cognos® Mobile, which is available from the Apple App Store.
You can see data, updated in near real time, from within your Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, including charts made from the spreadsheet data.