Scenario: Custom monitoring solutions

This scenario involves sending business-relevant information from IBM® and non-IBM applications to IBM Business Monitor.

About this task

The main mechanism by which information is made available to IBM Business Monitor is in the form of events that are emitted from the environment that you want to monitor.

In this scenario, you create an event emitter that interacts with the application or applications to be monitored and emits events that contain pertinent information for business activity monitoring. In other words, you instrument the application to programmatically emit events to IBM Business Monitor.

These are the main steps for this scenario:

Scenario: Evaluating the application and determining the key business measures for business activity monitoring
This step involves evaluation of what business measures apply to the application to be monitored. As part of this evaluation, you identify what source operations within the application you want to expose to IBM Business Monitor, and any application-to-application interactions that are interesting for business activity monitoring purposes. There might be multiple applications involved in the solution that you want to monitor. The business analyst needs to understand the application operations that are important to business activity monitoring.
Scenario: Creating the event emitter
This scenario requires you to implement an emitter that will emit events based on the requirements you defined in the previous step. In some cases, you could opt to modify the application directly to enable it to emit events containing the required information. It might be easier to write a standalone application that acts as the event emitter and that communicates to the application using whatever form you find most efficient. This interaction could include using call-outs if the application supports it, using programming interfaces that the application provides to query and extract information from the application, and accessing the application data store or logs to extract information.
Scenario: Creating the monitor model
IBM Business Monitor uses a monitor model to process and operate on events that are emitted from your event emitter. For this scenario, IT developers use the Business Monitor development toolkit that is built into the Integration Designer environment to construct a monitor model. The monitor model contains information that defines how to monitor the application or applications.
Scenario: Testing the monitor model
After you have completed your monitor model, you should test it to be sure that you receive the expected results. IT developers can test the monitor model using the Monitor test environment in IBM Integration Designer.
Scenario: Testing the event emitter and monitor model
If you have completed the previous steps, you now have a tested monitor model. You might have tested the model using your event emitter or you might have used the IBM Business Monitor test client.
Scenario: Creating the dashboards
Dashboards display information about the monitored model. Some dashboards might have been created for testing purposes, but now you will create dashboards for business users.
Scenario: Performing additional preproduction testing and deploying into production
Depending on the process your organization uses to move applications from development to production, you might complete extensive testing in a preproduction environment, which might include testing in a WebSphere® Application Server high availability environment.