Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) .. Key components

With the amount of industry buzz around SOA and technologies like MDM, BPM and BAM, it would be difficult to find out an IT Leader who does not want the benefits of BAM in his organization. There are quite a few products in the market in this segment which will catch your eye. I would discuss the key components of BAM tool/framework in this post.

The key to any enterprise is to understand the Business Events (external and internal) and treat them accordingly. There are certain business events that would help you know the business heath. There are certain business events which together can tell you the performance, trends etc. This is nothing but business intelligence, in fact real-time business intelligence.

Ideally there would be three components of a BAM tool

1. Event Absorption Layer also known as the Data Collector Layer
2. Event Processing Layer
3. Delivery Layer

Event absorption layer is the one that collects business events from the enterprise. If you look at application landscape of any organization, you would find number of applications (legacy, custom developed, packaged apps etc). Business processes and business logic lie embedded in these applications in many cases. Data collection can be either using push/pull model. Application pushing data or BAM framework pulling the data from these sources. As it is difficult to collect/absorb data from these diverse sources, integration platforms and technologies play a vital role here. Due care should be taken so that this event collection/absorption is as non-invasive as possible so as not to affect the performance of these business applications.

Event Processing Layer has the job of analyzing and correlating these events based on some rules and assumptions. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are nothing but filtered and correlated event data based on some rules. This layer consists of a rules engine,an analytics engine and a predictive engine (fingerprinting engine) . Predictive engine uses the analyzed and correlated data from the business events to predict.

Finally, the Delivery layer to deliver the results to the end users. There should be a notification/alert engine to notify the users if required using different channels. There should be portal(preferably web based) for the users to have a look at the filtered, correlated and analyzed data.