What is BAM used for?
BAM is used to monitor business milestones and key metrics in near real-time throughout a process in BizTalk.
Description
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides visibility on business processes by tracking process milestones and business data (KPIs). BAM allows business users and decision-makers to gain insight into the current health of in-flight processes they are responsible for. Up-to-date information is accessible to users via Microsoft Office BI tools or a designated portal and through automatic business alerts. This allows users to streamline and improve daily business operations by proactively escalating issues and mitigating problems sooner.
BAM is composed of a collection of tools and runtime components to layer business tracking without having to write any code. A set of runtime interceptors capture interesting business events inside of BizTalk Application or other applications and publish those events into the BAM infrastructure.
It also provides a set of tools for managing this infrastructure, tools for aggregating and viewing the data as well as APIs to optionally publish data through custom code.
BAM is tied directly to the central BizTalk engine (that is, processes and databases) through OLAP cubes. These cubes are created automatically when a developer deploys a BAM report and profile, typically by using a combination of Microsoft Excel pivot tables and the BizTalk Tracking Profile Editor.
BAM Activities
BAM activities identify the milestones and tracking data an individual is interested in tracking. Milestones are the steps in an activity that are measured in time, and tracking data is the key data points in a process you are interested in tracking (such as a customer ID or name).
BAM View
A BAM view is a representation of the milestones and business data tracked in one or more activities.
- The Group milestone allows related milestones to be treated as a single milestone. For example, grouping the EndSuccess and Exception milestones is useful to indicate the completion of the process regardless of whether it completed successfully or failed.
- A duration calculates the time between two business milestones and is useful when reporting the time elapsed between two milestones is important.
- A progress dimension defines milestones and stages for a process. A progress dimension allows you to display how many processes are in an existing status at a given time. For example, a progress dimension will display how many processes are in the middle of execution, how many encountered an exception, or how many processed without an exception.
- Alias Allows the referencing of a previously created milestone
BAM alerts
BAM alerts allow you to configure and receive alerts related to specific changes in business data. Alerts are set up per BAM view.
BAM is based on SQL Server Reporting Services, and events are fundamentally triggered via SQL Server Notification Services.
Deployment
Use the deploy-all command to deploy the BAM activity and view defined in your BAM Excel workbook:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Tracking\BM.exe deploy-all -DefinitionFile:"MyBAMWorkbook.xls"
This command reads the BAM Excel workbook specified in the DefinitionFile parameter and creates SQL Server database artifacts based on the activities and view defined in the spreadsheet.
Related links
- BAM Management Utility Commands – bm.exe
- BAM – SQL Server Views in the BAM Primary Import Database
- BAM – The BAM Databases
- BAM API – Using OrchestrationEventStream to write BAM Events from BizTalk orchestration
- BAM API – Using MessagingEventStream to write BAM Events from pipeline components
- BAM – Limitation of Tracking Profile Editor (TPE)
- BAM Tools
- BAM – The BAM API objects…
- BAM Data Sources – Where the data came from?
- BAM – Why are the times for my tracking data in the BAM portal incorrect?
- BAM Excel Add-In for Excel 2007 – This workbook has lost its VBA project, ActiveX controls and any other programmability-related features
- Enabling the BAM Excel Add-In for Excel 2007
