Business Activity Monitoring Overview

This section is a summary of what constitutes the FTM monitoring solution. The enabling technologies that host the FTM Application, FTM Monitor, and FTM Dashboard are:
  • IBM® Integration Bus
  • IBM WebSphere® Application Server
  • IBM Business Monitor
  • IBM Business Space (which is installed when you install IBM Business Monitor)
  • IBM Cognos® v10.2
  • IBM DB2®
The transport of event information between the FTM Application and the FTM Monitor is provided by IBM WebSphere MQ.

The FTM Application publishes MQ messages (business events) that are consumed by the FTM Monitor, which is an enterprise application that is deployed under a monitor enabled WebSphere Application Server profile.

The FTM Monitor consumes business events and obtains data from them. The data is stored for use in computing KPI values when requested to do so by the dashboard widgets.

The FTM Dashboard, when displayed by a user with a browser, issues requests periodically to the FTM Monitor for KPI data. The KPI data is displayed on the dashboard pages when it is received. The FTM Dashboard also includes analysis pages, which display interactive reports generated as needed by IBM Cognos using data stored by the monitor on DB2.

For more information about how business activity monitoring is performed for FTM,see the following figure and follow the descriptions.

Figure 1. FTM business activity monitoring overview

Seven IBM technology products are used to provide a business activity monitoring infrastructure for use with the FTM Application. In addition to the infrastructure products, there are several FTM specific applications that use the infrastructure to complete the system.

The numbers in this list correspond to the numbers in the following figure.
  1. IBM Integration Bus provides the run time for the FTM Application.
  2. IBM WebSphere MQ provides the messaging infrastructure used for transport of events between the FTM Application and the FTM Business Monitor.
  3. IBM WebSphere Application Server provides the base run time for the FTM Monitor, which is packaged as an enterprise archive (EAR) file. It also provides web hosting for the dashboard web application, which is provided by IBM Business Space.
  4. IBM Business Monitor is a product that hosts the FTM Monitor. IBM Business Monitor is a set of applications and other artifacts that are deployed within WebSphere Application Server to add capability for hosting business monitors like the FTM Monitor.
  5. IBM Business Space is a component that enables the FTM Dashboard to be viewed using a web browser. IBM Business Space includes a web application and other artifacts that are deployed within WebSphere Application Server to add capability to display dashboards like the FTM Dashboard application.
    • The FTM Dashboard is imported into Business Space from a .zip file.
    • The FTM Dashboard includes pages of display widgets that issue requests to IBM Business Monitor for data to display using the web application.
  6. IBM Cognos is a product that is used by the dashboard to allow analysis of hierarchical data that is gathered by the FTM Monitor from the FTM Application. When you install IBM Business Monitor a copy of IBM Cognos is also installed. The IBM Cognos installation is strictly licensed for use by IBM Business Monitor and IBM Business Space and cannot be used for any other purposes.
  7. IBM DB2 is a database manager product that is used to provide data persistence for IBM Business Monitor and IBM Cognos.

    In addition to the infrastructure components listed above, there are the FTM specific applications. These are listed below.

  8. FTM Application: The FTM Application is the source of the performance data that is monitored. The FTM Application runs under IBM Integration Bus. It processes several types of requests including payment origination requests, liquidity requests, payments gateway requests, and repair requests. The FTM Application includes code that runs periodically to measure application performance in terms of request backlogs and request processing time (also called latency) for the various types of requests. This code generates the events that are consumed by the monitor.
  9. Events: Event is a term used to refer to a message that is sent by the FTM Application that contains information about application performance. Events are formatted XML information. The FTM Application posts events to a WebSphere MQ Pub/Sub topic so the event information can be consumed by other applications, including the FTM Monitor.
  10. FTM Monitor: This is an enterprise application that runs under WebSphere Application Server that is configured to use IBM Business Monitor support . The FTM Monitor consumes events that are published by the FTM Application. It obtains information from the events, persists the information, and accesses the information on behalf of the FTM Dashboard.
    • The FTM Monitor EAR file is deployed under a WebSphere Application Server installation that has IBM Business Monitor installed on it.
    • The FTM Monitor receives data by MQ events posted by the FTM Application, computes values needed for display on the dashboard, and stores the data in a DB2 database.
  11. FTM Dashboard Definitions: These definitions are used by IBM Business Space to provide a web enabled view of the data that has been received by the FTM Monitor. As you will see, there are several types of views of this data provided by widgets that are placed on the dashboard pages.