Business Process Monitoring approach

Question

My customer has a requirement to implement a monitoring mechanism for all of their critical transactions. By referring to critical transactions, those transactions are the most important transactions required for their daily business operations for their work. However, these transactions are not within one single system, instead they are spread across multiple disparate systems. They have an existing Web portal built on Websphere Portal (it is expected to be migrated to Sitefinity and ASP.NET/Azure in the near future), they have a in-house built CRM system built using .NET, another mini-CRM system used by some back office executives built on Mainframe CICS, they have some important batch jobs running in the background which are very important for the Web App and CRM to function correctly.

Customer is looking for a holistic view of all of these transactions, and they would like to see that in a single dashboard view - they are looking for the health of these transactions, are they up or down, if they are up then the statistics of how many records processed (for batch) etc.

I am aware of business process monitoring/business activity monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring etc. Can someone shed more light on these topics? What are the difference between these two? If they are the same, then can it be used here? Can this be implemented using one tool, or it requires multiple tools/softwares/products? If there is a single product, such product has a dashboard feature? If business process monitoring is not is relevant here, then what is the best approach? Also, please share some scenarios where Business Process Monitoring can be used.

Note: I believe Application Performance monitoring is limited to monitoring one application and what I am looking for is more than that.

Answer 1

Most of the BPM tools actually build the UI and handle the backend. They do not instrument and track existing applications. APM tools do in fact do this, but the goal of them is performance and health, so it should satisfy your requirements. APM tools are much more than this, they provide diagnostic and deep visibility which will help the business beyond just health monitoring.

The challenge is how to instrument the applications you have. Since the systems are in .NET and Java it should work. Many APM tools also instrument web front ends, which it sounds like you have too. I wasn't sure on the CICS comment, is there a terminal interface for that, or is there a transaction going from Java to CICS to DB2 or something of the sort?

Only a few APM tools will support CICS.