Scenario: Creating the monitor model
IBM® Business Monitor uses a monitor model to process and operate on events that are emitted from the IBM Business Process Manager Advanced application. For this scenario involving monitoring an IBM Business Process Manager Advanced application, IT developers use the Business Monitor development toolkit installed into the IBM Integration Designer environment to construct a monitor model. The monitor model contains information that defines how to monitor the application.
About this task
In a previous step, the business analyst defined requirements for business measures associated with the application to document these business measures along with the process implemented by the application. In this step, you will fully define the business measures to be monitored and how they will be calculated. You might need to collaborate with the business analyst to iterate on the business measures required. This means that the steps for process modeling, event definition, application development, down to this step of creating the monitor model might be iterated on a number of times before closing on a final application and monitor model. Another possibility is that during creation of the monitor model, you might need to work with the application developer to modify the events being emitted by the application.
Another input that you might need is any Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) diagrams created as part of modeling the process. These diagrams can be used in the Diagrams on the dashboards to provide a visual view of the process. Draft designs of the dashboards can be useful during this task.
You might choose to implement some of the monitor model, then proceed to testing your application and model, then add more elements to the monitor model, and complete additional testing. It is sometimes helpful to iterate on these steps and incrementally evolve your monitor model and application.
A monitor model describes business measures (such as metrics and key performance indicators), their dependencies on incoming events, conditions warranting business actions (business situations), and outbound events that report such conditions and might trigger business actions.
- Gather information from events that will be used to calculate the required business measures. Optionally, information can be stored in a data warehouse for historical analysis.
- Group events about the same monitored entity together.
- Structure this information (for example, to allow dimensional analysis).
- Combine this information (for example, to identify trends).
- Identify business situations in near real time, and trigger resulting actions by sending out events.
To create the monitor model, use the IBM Business Monitor development toolkit in Integration Designer to create a business monitoring project. The project contains the monitor model and its associated event definitions and, optionally, any SVG diagrams referenced from the visual model part of the monitor model.
You can use the Monitor development environment to generate a monitor model based on the application to be monitored, or use an existing monitor model and generate additions to the monitor model based on the application to be monitored. Templates are provided that automate the model generation for certain types of applications, defining commonly used metrics and KPIs that you can use as-is or modify as needed. These commonly used metrics and KPIs are pre-configured based on the events emitted by the application.
You can perform the model creation either by generating a monitor model from the Integration Designer application and modifying that model to add the additional elements such as KPIs to the model, or creating the model first and then creating the application to be monitored.