You have modeled the process, implemented it, performed a simulation, and deployed and tested the process. Process owners will want to monitor the running process to see how it is performing. They need to have an insight into the working of the process in order to track process performance, access process design, process design refinements, and correlate process performance with related business activities and KPIs. BPM and SOA administrators manage the deployed application and they ensure that it is running properly and also resolve any issues that occur.
In this chapter, you will first look at process analytics, monitoring, and then administration. You will configure process analytics by specifying the business indicators to the processes in your project, and assign values to them, identify sampling points for capturing business indicators, configure the project to use BPM Cubes or Oracle BAM or both, and then use BPM workspace or BAM architect to configure custom dashboards.
As a BPM administrator you will manage BPM roles, Organization Units, and approval groups, and perform a few other BPM-process-specific administrative tasks. As a SOA administrator you will configure and monitor the whole SOA suite system along with its deployments. Their main tool is Enterprise Manager.
We will first look at SOA Admin tasks and then switch to BPMN Admin tasks.
In this chapter we will look at the following:
- Creating a custom dashboard in the BPM workspace
- Create business indicators
- Data assignment to business indicators
- Create measurement marks
- Add counters
- Deploy and create custom dashboards
- Configuring BAM Architect to create custom dashboards
- Create a Data object folder in Oracle BAM Architect
- Enable BAM in a BPMN project
- Create BAM data objects
- Create BAM custom dashboards
- View custom dashboards
- SOA Admin—Configuring SOA infrastructure properties
- SOA Admin—Monitoring SOA infrastructure
- SOA Admin—Administering BPMN applicationdeployment
- SOA Admin—Fault recovery for BPMN processes
- SOA Admin—Configuring notification settings
- BPM Admin—Integrating Oracle BPM with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring
- BPM Admin—Managing roles, Organization Units, and groups
- BPM Admin—Setting rules
- BPM Admin—Using flex fields/mapped attributes
- BPM Admin—Monitoring BPM processes.
Business Process Analytics enables you to monitor the performance of your deployed processes. It measures the key performance indicators in your project and stores them in a database. Process analysts can view the metrics stored in the Process Analytics databases using workspace dashboards or Oracle BAM, depending on the database you select to store the information.
Process developers can define process specific metrics using business indicators. Business indicators are a special type of project Data object that the BPMN service engine stores in the Process Analytics databases when it runs the BPMN processes.
BPM Suite 11g has an audit service that continuously audits process metrics and user defined business indicators. This audit information is pushed to process STAR schema or BAM Data objects. You can then create customized dashboards ontop of the process STAR schema or the information can be consumed by external business intelligence tools such as OBIEE and others.
Oracle BPEL has sensors and it can be monitored on BAM dashboards; AIA has audit logging mechanisms which you have to invoke, to get the information logged. In BPM you have BAM Data Objects as well as BPM Process Cubes.
The following list describes the typical tasks you perform when you use Process Analytics in a BPM project:
- Adding business indicators to the processes in your project and assigning values to them
- Identifying sampling points for capturing business indicators
- Configuring the project to use BPM cubes or Oracle BAM, or both
- Deploying your project
- Using BPM workspace or BAM architect to configure custom dashboards
I. Adding business indicators to the processes in your project and assign values to them
Process Analyst will define the key performance indicators and process metrics you want to monitor while developing your process. There are standard predefined metrics for activities and processes, including active instance count and average time to completion, broken out by process, activity, and participant. Supported predefined measures are the number of active instances, average time to complete an activity, average time to complete a process, and so on. The supported predefined dimensions are process, activity, and participants.
You can also define custom measures according to your needs. To define custom measures, you use business indicators. The different types of business indicators enable you to measure specific values, keep track of categories, or count the times an instance completes one or more activities. Oracle BPM provides you with a set of predefined cubes you can use to store the Process Analytics data. Cubes are a structure used to organize a database, so that it enables you to analyze data in real time and view it from multiple perspectives. You can also choose to store these data to Oracle BAM or use both systems simultaneously.
You can use business indicators to store the value of an indicator you want to measure in your process, or to store a category you want to use to group the values you measured in your process. Business indicators are project Data objects that are used to store the value of the KPIs of your process. They can store the value of an indicator you want to measure in your process. According to the type of information you want to store, you can define your business indicator as one of the following:
- Measure This stores the value of a key performance indicator that you can measure. Measures will help you capture numerical data which signifies a value that will help you in analytics. Measures only allow data types that are continuous. You must use them with measurement marks such as sales total, deal amount, discount percentage, and so on.
- Dimension This stores the value of a key performance indicator that you can use to group the values of the measure business indicators in your process. It specifies how the data needs to be picked. Dimensions store the value of a KPI that you can use to group the values of the measure business indicators in your process. If you use a continuous data value to define a dimension, then you must add at least one range. The Process Analytics database only stores the range value if the data value is a continuous one such as region, order type, deal range, or industry type.
- Counters These are the type of measures used to keep track of the number of times an instance completes a certain activity. You must use them with counter marks.
II. Identifying sampling points for capturing business indicators
At runtime, when the BPMN Service Engine runs the activity in the process, it stores data about the process in the BPM Cubes and Oracle BAM Data Objects. This data comes from the sampling points defined in the project.
Add measurement marks or counter marks in the processes where you want to track the value of the business indicators and configure sampling points generation for the project or process.
Sampling points are broadly divided into two types:
- Built-in sampling point—configured at project, process, and activity level:
- Generate sampling for all user tasks
- Generate sampling for start/end of process
- Generate sampling for start/end of activity
- User defined sampling point:
- Measurement marks store the following data in the Process Analytics databases:
- The value of the process default measures
- The value of the measure business indicators associated to that measurement mark
- The value of the dimensions defined in the process
- Single measurement sample business indicators at a specific point in the process
- Counter mark is used to track the number of times the instance runs the particular activity interval (start and end)
- Measurement marks store the following data in the Process Analytics databases:
This will measure a business indicator in a section of your process. Always use these measurement marks to monitor critical sections of your process.
III. Configuring the project to use BPM Cubes or Oracle BAM, or both
Oracle BPM provides a set of predefined cubes you can use to monitor the activity of your processes. These predefined process cubes are enabled by default. If cubes are enabled when the BPMN Service Engine runs the processes in your project, then it populates the cubes. You can then view the data stored in these cubes using the dashboards provided by the BPM workspace application.
The BPMN Service Engine populates the predefined cubes each time it runs an activity or completes a process. The engine uses the sampling points configuration you defined, to populate the cubes. If you configure a process to not generate sampling points, then the BPMN Service Engine does not store this information in the predefined cubes.
You can use Oracle BAM to monitor the activity of the process in your project, leveraging the capabilities of Oracle BAM while using Oracle BPM. When you run a process that has Oracle BAM enabled, the BPMN service engine populates the Oracle BAM database with information about the business indicators measured in that process. The BPMN Service Engine generates this information based on the sampling points preference you defined in your project.
IV. Deploying the project
Refer to the section Deploying the project mentioned in Chapter 3, Process Deployment and Testing, to learn more about the deployment mechanism.
V. Use BPM workspace or BAM Architect to configure custom dashboards
After publishing, the application business analysts can use the default dashboards BPM workspace provided or create custom dashboards to view the metrics the BPMN service engine gathered while running BPMN processes.
End users can create custom (user defined) dashboards by defining graphs in the BPM workspace and assembling those graphs to define a dashboard.
You can even use BAM Architect to create a BAM dashboard, with the BPM business indicators defined in your process. You can enable BAM Architect to create BAM dashboards with the following steps:
- Create Data object folder in Oracle BAM Architect.
- Enable BAM in BPMN project.
- Create BAM data objects.
- Create BAM custom dashboards.
- View custom dashboards.
There are two types of administrators in Oracle BPM:
- SOA Administrators: They configure and monitor the whole SOA Suite system along with its deployments
- Tool: Enterprise Manager
- BPM Administrators: They manage BPM roles, Organization Units, Approval Groups, and perform other BPM process-specific administrative tasks
- Tools: They use Business Process Composer, Business Process Workspace, and Oracle Enterprise Manager
SOA Administration includes configuring SOA Infrastructure properties, monitoring SOA Infrastructure, deploying SOA Composite applications, monitoring SOA Composite application, fault recovery for BPMN Processes, and notification settings.
BPMN Administrator activities includes configuring BPMN Process Service Engine properties, integrating Oracle BPM with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, monitoring BPMN process service components and engines, managing the Oracle BPMN service components and engines, and flex fields.