Visibility in the business processes is crucial to business-related persons in order to see and interpret what is happening inside an enterprise system. Business-relevant metrics allow to evaluate the effectiveness of processes. Without visibility into the processes, the enterprise application acts as a black box.

Business-related metrics are an invaluable asset to business experts. They provide domain-specific information as to how the use cases perform. Which metrics are of interested obviously depends on the domain.

How many cars are created per hour? How many articles are purchased and for what amount? What is the conversion rate? How many users followed the email marketing campaign? These are examples of domain-specific key performance indicators. The business experts have to define these indicators for the specific domain.

The enterprise application has to emit this information which originate from various points in the business processes. The nature of this information depends on the actual domain. In many cases, business metrics arise from domain events that occur during performing the business processes.

Take the number of cars that are created per hour as an example. The car creation use case emits a corresponding CarCreated domain event, which is collected for future statistics. Whereas calculating the conversion rate involves much more information.

The business experts have to define the semantics and origin behind key performance indicators. Defining and collecting these indicators becomes part of the use case. Emitting this information is a responsibility of the application as well.

It's important to distinguish between business-motivated and technically-motivated metrics. Although business metrics provide insights of high value, they are directly impacted by technical metrics. An example of a technical metric is the service response time which is, in turn, affected by other technical metrics. The sub-chapter Technical metrics will examine this topic further.

Business experts, therefore, must not only care about the business aspects of monitoring but also the technical impact of an application's responsiveness.