BAM Dashboard V 001 - Making business sense out of BAM

We are in the process of designing the WSO2 Business Activity Monitor's dashboards views, based on the data collected.

On the right hand side what you see is the initial design of the server - service - operation drill down view.

And one obvious question would be, how would just raw service invocation data might make any business sense? Well it does really make lot of business sense, thanks to the business-IT alignment in SOA. See the next image below.


In here I have expanded the data view for three operations for three services. These operations are, placeOrder from OrderBooking service, raiseInvoice from Billing service and receiveAdvice from Payment service.

If we compare the response counts for the operations, we can see our success funnel, from order booking, invoicing through to receipt of payment. 429 orders placed successfully, out of which only 264 reached billing stage and only 204 payments made so far. Hence in the current state, we have less than 50% success rate in making real business out of all the orders placed. The business person would naturally question, "what can be done to improve that".

That is only one use case for making business sense, out of only these three graphs . There can be many other cases, that can be modeled using only these three graphs. For e.g. why did 40 orders failed in the place order operation itself? Out of 429 successfully placed orders, why were only 264 invoiced; what happened to 165 orders along the way?

As you can see, if your SOA design is business sensitive, which is one of the guiding principles in SOA, the business-IT alignment, a simple business activity monitoring exercise can provide immense insight as to what the state of your business is.

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