Environment Groups and Stages

As part of this user journey, consider two actors who play the following roles:

  • John – An IBM® webMethods customer who owns an enterprise that is called XYSsales and sells many products on his business platform. To run his business better, he uses products like IBM webMethods API Gateway, IBM webMethods Integration, and IBM webMethods B2B. XYSsales has numerous partner enterprises. XYSsales uses IBM products for their business solutions as well as in-house products.

  • Emma – An employee of an enterprise XYZTrade, an enterprise partner of XYSsales.

Existing setup

  • XYSsales builds solutions for its finance department in the XYSsalesFinanceDev development environment.

  • The enterprise builds the same solutions that are deployed in a production environment XYSsalesFinanceProd.

  • XYSsales logistics department has an ongoing solution built in the XYSsalesLogisticDev development environment.

Challenge

John reviews numerous business transactions in a day. These transactions move across various environments, stages, and IBM applications. When a transaction fails, John has difficulty in finding out which specific product caused the failure. John also needs to find out the root cause of slow transactions.

Use Case 1

  • A customer of XYSsales does a business transaction with partner enterprise XYZTrade.

  • On successful completion of this transaction, they start IBM webMethods Integration Flow services to do some logical operations.

  • XYSsales exposes this transaction through an API Gateway API to control the transaction invocation. Policies like authorization and throttling are used to achieve this control. The API Name is InvokeXYSsalesInfo.

  • Emma runs the preceding described transaction and John needs to view the flow of this transaction to analyze issues and delays.

Tenant WMIO Flow B2B Channel API Gateway
XYSsalesFinanceDev ComputeXYLogisticAccountCount XYSsalesChannel, Sender: XYSsales InvokeXYSsalesInfo

Root Cause

  1. John logs in to his IBM webMethods iPaaS tenant XYSsalesFinanceDev. It lists all the products that he currently uses for his business needs.

  2. John selects IBM webMethods Integration, and then the Monitor tab to view all transactions specific to IBM webMethods Integration.

  3. He selects End-to-End Monitoring by using the app switcher.

  4. John selects Administrator on his user profile link and makes sure that the environment group listing is setup right to view his transaction.

  5. He selects a time range to cover the time window of Emma's transaction.

    tutorial screenshot

  6. John now makes Environment group and Stages in View selections on the masthead filters to simplify locating his transaction.

    tutorial screenshot

  7. John is able to locate the transaction he is looking for within the All Transactions group.

    tutorial screenshot

  8. Selecting the transaction allows him to view the full flow of the business flow map. The window also shows him the finer details of time delay and the reason for any failure.

  9. For further details, John clicks the More details link of that product and traverses to that product's monitoring page.

    tutorial screenshot

Use Case 2

This use case is an exact replica of use case 1, with the only exception that it is deployed in the production environment. Hence, John is running the same set of steps that are listed earlier with the following exceptions:

Tenant WMIO Flow B2B Channel API Gateway
XYSsalesFinanceProd ComputeXYLogisticAccountCount XYSsalesChannel, Sender: XYSsales InvokeXYSsalesInfo

Root Cause

  1. This time, John logs in to his IBM webMethods iPaaS tenant XYSsalesFinanceProd.

  2. He verifies the environment group listing and selects the time range as in use case 1.

  3. His masthead filter selections are Finance and Production.

    tutorial screenshot

  4. He now easily locates his production transaction and looks into more details.

    tutorial screenshot

Use Case 3

This use case is deployed for John's logistics department. To calculate some expenses, they receive data from the finance department. In this new environment, they call a REST API from XYSsalesFinanceDev and then processes it in a workflow to calculate some expenses for the logistics department.

Tenant Finance WMIO REST API Called WMIO workflow Logistics WMIO workflow
XYSsalesLogisticDev GetConsumedCouponDetails ConsumedCouponDetails ComputeConsumtionOnGivenDates

Root Cause

  1. John logs in to his IBM webMethods iPaaS tenant XYSsalesLogisticDev.

    tutorial screenshot

  2. He verifies the environment group listing and selects the time range as in use cases 1 and 2.

  3. His masthead filter selections are Logistics and Development.

    tutorial screenshot

  4. He locates the logistics transaction and looks into more details.

    tutorial screenshot