Business processes

Before you use the business processes feature, ensure that it is enabled for your environment.

Instana SaaS

In Instana SaaS deployments, this feature is enabled by default.

Self-hosted Instana

In self-hosted deployments, you must enable the Business processes feature flag. To enable the feature flag, see the following pages:

• Enabling optional features for Standard Edition
• Enabling optional features for Custom Edition

After enabling the feature, the Instana host agent automatically detects and extracts running business processes and activities on your business automation platforms. For more information about installing Instana agents, see Installing Instana agents.

The Business processes dashboard provides two tabs:

• Business perspectives tab
• Business processes tab

The Business processes tab displays a proactive view of detected business processes.

The Business processes table includes the following columns:

• the number of process instances that are started
• the process ID, which opens a ToggleTip with a copy button to easily copy the full ID to the clipboard
• the process version, which opens a ToggleTip with a copy button to easily copy the full version to the clipboard
• the number of activities that comprise the business process
• the process' IT health.

Use the Filter to filter the list of processes by building a tag query.

You do not need to configure the Business processes dashboard because Instana generates it automatically when the Instana agent detects any running supported BPM tools.

The Business perspectives tab displays a list of business perspectives that are created by the user. You can view your current perspectives with the descriptions, number of related processes, teams, and IT health. IT health is calculated based on whether any IT alerts are impacting the IT architecture that supports any business processes.

Click Create to create a new business perspective. The new business perspective Wizard is an interactive, simple way to create a perspective. It has three sections:

1. Specify the perspective's unique name, and provide an optional description.
2. Specify the perspective's model by selecting the tag filters to identify the processes to include.
3. Optionally select any number of RBAC teams to allow access to this perspective.

To view business perspective details, complete the following steps:

1. Click the Business perspectives tab of the Business processes dashboard.
2. Click the name of the perspective to view its details.
3. You can view the included business processes that comprise the perspective in the Business processes tab.
4. You can edit the filter, name, description, and teams for a business perspective in the Configuration tab.

To view business process details, complete the following steps:

1. Click the Business processes tab of the Business processes dashboard.
2. Click the name of the process to view its details.

The Summary on the business process details page displays the following information:

• The current number of instances the business process started.
• The total number of errors (IT issues) affecting services the process relies on.
• A count chart of started instances of the process over time.
• The top activities of the process, according to the following selectable metrics:
  • Mean latency
  • Call count
  • Erroneous call rate
• Any changes in the infrastructure that supports the process.
• An errors chart that shows the number of errors over time, which affect the services that the process relies on.
• A distribution chart shows the latency of calls within the business process over time, with selectable aggregations.

To see specific invocations of the business process and details on the instance calls and full traces, click Analyze Instances.

To view issues that are related to the IT architecture that supports the business process, click Issues.

The Flow tab displays a dynamic map showing the flow of activities through the selected process. Each node shows an activity and related information, with arrows pointing toward any child nodes. You can pan, zoom, and reset the view using mouse controls or the toolbar.

Each activity node is color-coded based on the health of the activity:

• Gray: Indicates a healthy activity
• Yellow: Indicates a warning state
• Red: Indicates an error state

You can click any yellow or red activity node to open an overlay that displays all events that are related to the selected activity.

On the business process details page, you can see the Activities tab, which contains a list of all activities that support the selected business process.

Select an activity to view the business activity details page on the Summary tab that contains the following details:

• The current number of instances the activity started.
• The total number of errors (IT issues) affecting services the activity relies on.
• A count chart of started instances of the activity over time.
• The top services of the activity, according to the following selectable metrics:
  • Mean latency
  • Call count
  • Erroneous call rate
• An infrastructure chart that shows changes and issues to services that support the activity.
• An errors chart that shows the number of errors over time, which affect the services that the process relies on.
• A distribution chart shows the latency of calls within the activity over time, with selectable aggregations.
• An activity duration chart (over time and distribution).

Duration represents the time elapsed between consecutive activities in your business process, such as the time taken from Validate Cart to Process Payment.

Latency represents the average time taken for a single call within an activity, calculated by dividing the total duration by the number of calls. This metric enables meaningful performance comparisons across activities with varying call volumes.

The business activity details page also contains a Services tab, which contains a list of all services that support the selected business activity.

You can use unbounded analytics to filter and group BPM calls. By default, if you click Analyze Instances on the Business process dashboard, then all invocations of that process are selected and grouped by Root Process Instance ID, which represents a single invocation of the process.

If business processes rely on an affected entity, the list of business processes that are impacted by the event is displayed on the Event page on the Events dashboard. For more information on how to configure and use events, see Managing events and alerts.

The Instana agent automatically detects and extracts running business processes and activities when deployed on a host that runs the supported BPM tools.

You can configure Instana to capture and store more business data from the business processes. To configure the Instana agent to capture such data, the data field names need to be added to *instanaAgentDir*/etc/instana/configuration.yaml. For example, the following extract is used to configure the capture of data from the IBM Business Automation Workflow sample application “Standard HR Open New Position”:

com.instana.tracing:
  extra-bpm-variables:
  - HiringManager
  - EmploymentStatus
  - Department
  - Location
  - GMApproval