BAM - Business Activity Monitoring

Posted on Apr. 1, 2010 at 03.30 PM - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Business Activity Monitoring is an IT infrastructure that allows users to respond to significant events and alerts in the business processes in a suitable and timely manner.

In practice, this can be done in 2 scenarios:

1. Publishing business events

An SAP application publishes events or alerts directly in Alert Management and thereby triggers alerts in the portal.

2. Milestone Monitoring

A central monitoring process subscribes to events that are published by one more applications (SAP or Non SAP applications connected to SAP PI via adapter). The monitoring process uses rules to decide whether an alert is to be triggered.

In this blog, we refer to milestone monitoring as business activity monitoring or BAM. Below are the steps to implement business activity monitoring using SAP PI:

1. Create business events

Identify the events in the business process that the monitoring process is to monitor

2. Define monitoring events

In the Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) define the required objects for mapping the event message. Define outbound service interface and abstract service interface for each event that the monitoring process is to process. Both outbound and abstract service interface use the message type, hence there is no mapping required in the interface determination.

3. Generate proxies

Generate proxies in the SAP application (transaction SPROXY) where the event is to be triggered. For non SAP, suitable SAP PI adapter has to be used to connect with the back end system.

4. Define event linkage

In the SAP application, define event linkage using transaction SWF_BAM. For non SAP, suitable mechanism has to be used to translate event to the message structure which will be then send the message to SAP PI through adapter.

5. Define monitoring process

Define monitoring process in ESR that subscribe to the event message. In the monitoring process we can also define the conditions or rules to generate an alert which link to Alert Management infrastructure. A monitoring process is a special form of an integration process. All rules that are valid for the use of integration processes are also relevant for monitoring processes.

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