Applications play a crucial role in both business and IT operations. However, IT organizations often lack visibility into the specific business processes their applications support and They also lack visibility into how these processes connect with the underlying systems.

Business processes are a collection of linked activities that produce a business outcome. These processes run across different IT systems, including mobile and web platforms, applications and the infrastructure they rely on.

Business process management (BPM) tools play a pivotal role in aiding enterprises to model and run their business processes. Business monitoring aims to seamlessly discover business process flows running on IT systems, extract relevant business context, and assist site reliability engineers (SREs) or business personas with issue prioritization based on business impact.

IBM Instana® Business Activity Monitoring automatically extracts business context from BPM tools, including Camunda, IBM Business Automation Workflow and jBPM, and seamlessly integrates it with IT context provided by the Instana APM and Infrastructure sensors.

Core features of Instana Business Activity Monitoring (IBAM)

IBAM automatically discovers, captures and displays business processes and associated activities. It offers detailed views into real-time metrics for business processes and activities, including counts of instances, changes in the underlying infrastructure, and IT issues impacting the process or activity.

With IBAM, you can perform these functions:

• Analyze individual instances of a business process and view issues related to the underlying IT architecture.
• Use unbounded analytics to filter and group BPM calls and monitor the effects of infrastructure events on business processes.
• Enable advanced functions by using several feature flags.
• Simplify monitoring complex systems and address potential issues quickly to help ensure optimal performance.

Business process summary dashboard

The Business Activity monitoring dashboard displays a real-time view of detected business processes, their key metrics and underlying IT health. Alerts on underlying IT resources provide updates on the IT health of each process. With this dashboard, you can quickly identify processes impacted by IT issues without requiring deep knowledge of the BPM’s underlying IT architecture.

Business processes integrated with IT context

Building a successful monitoring system involves collecting, processing and displaying real-time data, such as processing times, latency, errors and failure rates. Business monitoring provides a combined view of key IT metrics alongside business process and activity metrics.

Process and activity metrics include:

• Started process instances (count): The count of business process instances initiated within the selected time frame.
  • Errors: The total number of call errors within the selected time window.
  • Top activities: The top 5 activities in a business process that occur most frequently. This chart displays relevant IT metrics next to each activity, including call latency, the number of IT calls, and the rate of erroneous IT calls.
  • Top services: The top IT services that support individual business activities. Similar to the top activities chart, this chart includes call latency, the number of calls, and the erroneous call rate for each service.
  • Activity duration distribution: The duration of an activity over time, with multiple statistics such as mean, max and percentiles.
  • Latency: The latency of activity calls over time in milliseconds.
  • Infrastructure issues and changes: The infrastructure issues and changes to the services that support the business process and its underlying activities.

Impacted business processes on the events page

The addition of the impacted business processes table to the events page adds a layer of business context to IT events. It displays a summary of the affected business processes, including health information and associated severity levels.

Platform features

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a fundamental aspect of identity and access management (IAM) that grants access to specific actions and functions based on a user’s job function or role within an organization.

To help ensure that only authorized users have access to business data, IBAM enables administrators to control the visibility of business monitoring features for individual users and user groups.

Additional features

For users hosting BPM applications on-premises, IBAM is now supported by the Instana self-hosted operator. Also, Instana now supports the next-generation Camunda 8 platform.

IBAM in action: A use case

Let’s walk through a typical day with Stan, an SRE at a bank that uses Camunda to model and run business processes. Stan uses IBM IBAM to monitor their Camunda instance and has set up alerts for potential IT data issues within a business process.

After Stan arrives at work, he receives a Slack message from his configured alerts that indicating a prolonged increase in latency for the Camunda platform service. The latency of calls has vastly exceeded Stan’s configured threshold. He checks the Impacted Business Processes table and sees that the health of the Invoice Receipt process is affected. With his domain knowledge, Stan knows that this process is critical to the business and must be resolved immediately.

Stan navigates to the Invoice Receipt process dashboard within IBAM and observes that the call latency for the process is higher than expected. The summary dashboard, shows multiple errors within the last 10 minutes, and the Prepare Bank Transfer activity has significantly higher latency than other activities.

From the summary view, Stan sees that a spike in latency occurred right before the count of initiated Prepare Bank Transfer activities dramatically decreased. Later, several errors occurred, and the Camunda platform went offline.

With this readily accessible data, Stan pinpoints when the issue began and traces it back to the specific IT events that caused it.

With the business context provided by IBAM, Stan quickly identifies which part of the business process is impacted. Now that he has identified and analyzed the issue, he can take the necessary measures to resolve it.

With this update, IBM Instana bridges the gap between business and IT by observing business processes within the context of their logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications and infrastructure.

Designed specifically for cloud-native environments but compatible with any technology, the platform automatically and continuously delivers high-fidelity data with one-second granularity and unsampled end-to-end traces, crucial for today’s modern, dynamic and business-critical applications.