Business monitoring

Business Monitoring dashboard

The Business Monitoring dashboard provides a proactive view of detected business processes, process detail summaries (the number of instances started and number of activities) and their IT health. IT health is calculated based on whether there are any IT alerts impacting any of the IT architecture supporting the business process.

You do not need to configure the Business Monitoring dashboard, because Instana generates this dashboard automatically when Business Monitoring is enabled and supported tools are being monitored.

Viewing details for a business process

To view details for a business process, click a business process in the Business Monitoring dashboard.

The business process details page shows the following details:

• 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 affecting services the process relies on.
• A distribution chart showing 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 supporting the business process, click Issues.

Viewing details for a business 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. The business activity details page 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 affecting services the activity relies on.
• A distribution chart showing latency of calls within the activity over time, with selectable aggregations.
• An activity duration chart (over time and distribution).

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

BPM in unbounded analytics

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.

BPM in the events page

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.

Configuring Business Monitoring

You can use the following options to configure Business Monitoring:

• IBM Business Automation Workflow:

  To enable tracing of IBM Business Automation workflow, add the following snippet to <instana-agent-dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml:

  com.instana.plugin.javatrace:
    instrumentation:
      bawEnabled: true
  

• Data capture from executing business processes:

  You can configure Instana to capture and store business data from the business processes running in any of the supported tools. To configure Instana Agent to capture such data, the data field names need to be added to <instana-agent-dir>/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