IBM Integration Bus

IBM® Integration Bus is built for universal connectivity and transformation in heterogeneous information technology environments. It distributes information and data generated by business events in real time to people, applications, and devices throughout your enterprise and beyond. IBM Integration Bus provides a framework that enables you to create and modify these business rules that are applied to the messages in the system.

In previous versions, you could use the event schemas exported from IBM Integration Bus to create a monitor model manually. With IBM Integration Bus 7.0, you can use monitoring information exported from IBM Integration Bus to generate a monitor model. See Generating monitor models from IBM Integration Bus message flows for details about using this new feature that greatly simplifies the task of creating a monitor model.

IBM Integration Bus enables information packaged as messages to flow between different business applications, ranging from large traditional systems to unmanned devices such as sensors on pipelines. IBM Integration Bus can be used to route messages between senders and recipients. It can also be used to transform the messages from one format to another to accommodate the different requirements of senders and recipients of the messages. The message flows that you design control message routing. A message flow describes the operations to be performed on the incoming message, and the sequence in which they are carried out. IBM Integration Bus handles the processing required for the information to arrive at the right application in the correct format according to rules defined by the customer. Existing applications do not need to be modified or know anything about the routing and transformation details.

A message flow is a sequence of processing steps that runs when the broker receives an input message. A message flow contains message flow nodes. You can configure your message flows to emit event messages. The event messages can be used to support transactions, auditing, and business process monitoring. A message flow node has a fixed number of input and output points known as terminals. Terminals identify points where a message can enter or leave a node.

IBM Integration Bus can emit message flow transaction events that contain the entire message payload or some fields extracted from the message. IBM Integration Bus provides commands to define the monitoring profile to add selected fields from a message to the generated event. It allows you to associate a monitoring profile with a message flow and enable monitoring.

IBM Integration Bus 6.1.0.3 provided improved facilities for monitoring events emitted from message flows. A IBM Integration Bus message flow can emit terminal events from any terminal in a message flow. If the flow is active and enabled for event emission, then the flow emits an event each time a message passes through the terminal. The IBM Business Monitor development toolkit allows you to configure event emission on a given terminal on a node. You can extract both simple and complex data from the message payload. You can use the GUI to control the content of the monitoring events emitted from the message flows. The IBM Integration Bus toolkit includes an editor to create XPath expressions for populating event content.

IBM Integration Bus supplies sample models that you can examine and deploy on IBM Business Monitor. You can use the IBM Business Monitor dashboards to get reports on these events.

IBM Integration Bus provides a message-driven bean (MDB) to install on the IBM Business Monitor server that forwards these events to IBM Business Monitor.

For additional information on using IBM Integration Bus, refer to the IBM Integration Bus information center.

Sample monitor models ship with IBM Integration Bus. For additional information, see the Samples Gallery in the IBM Integration Bus toolkit.