IBM Business Monitor, V8.0.1 > Get started with IBM Business Monitor

Product overview

IBM Business Monitor is a business activity monitoring environment that displays key performance indicators and metrics through dashboards. You can combine IBM Business Monitor with other Business Process Management (BPM) software to accelerate processes and facilitate business innovation. BPM governs an organization’s cross-functional, core business process to achieve business objectives by directing resources from across the organization into efficient processes that create customer value.

Use IBM Business Monitor in your business environment to:

• Define actions to take when specified situations occur.
• Capture business-related data from business applications, based on the monitor model that you define and install.
• Extract the measurement variables from the data.
• Transform the variables into metric and KPI values.
• Display the measurement values on your dashboard.

  For example, you can display instance diagrams in context in any annotated Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) diagrams. You can define elements to set colors, show and hide, associate metric and KPI values, and more.

• Provide business intelligence insight through dimensional analysis and reporting.

• Identify and notify you of operation failures for inspection and analysis.

Monitor models describe how events should be processed and how information should be collected for use with dashboards. The IBM Business Monitor development toolkit provides technical users with an environment for creating and testing monitor models.

The IBM Business Monitor server receives and processes events from business applications, and it can subscribe to business events from various sources, including IBM BPM and other applications in the business environment.

You can use IBM Business Monitor to correlate events from IBM BPM and a broad range of IBM middleware for end-to-end monitoring, including the following products:

• IBM Operational Decision Management

• WebSphere Message Broker

• WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus

• WebSphere ILOG JRules

• WebSphere Business Events

• WebSphere DataPower X150

• WebSphere Sensor Events

• WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition
• Sterling Control Center
• CICS
• IMS™
• IBM FileNet P8

You can also monitor third-party environments, such as SAP, by using the IBM Adapters.

The events that the server receives reflect your business activity. Information processed from the events is stored in the Business Monitor database.

The monitor model can also be designed to provide end-to-end monitoring of your business transactions, even if those transactions are made up of discrete processes from different products.

You can configure the IBM Business Monitor server to detect special business situations and manage the resulting actions.

You use the Monitor dashboards to run your Monitor widgets. Using a supported web browser, you can display one or more uniquely configured widgets, such as Alerts or Instances, on a page of a dashboard space.

You can group pages into one or more spaces.

You can also have dashboards automatically generated when you deploy a monitor model, instead of configuring the dashboards manually.

• Comprehensive business environment
  IBM Business Monitor provides real-time business activity monitoring for your business processes, regardless of where those processes run. You can use IBM Business Monitor dashboards to visualize your business performance. The dashboards can display data at both the individual instance level and at the aggregate level and can offer sophisticated dimensional analysis.
• Iterative development environment
  The Business Monitor development toolkit enhances the development process by providing the Monitor Model editor to help you create monitor models. Additionally, the IBM Business Monitor test environment can be installed to facilitate testing your monitor models before deployment.
• Production environment
  The IBM Business Monitor server hosts the monitor models that you have created. The IBM Business Monitor server and the monitor models work together to process events, calculate business metrics, and respond to business situations.
• Key technical concepts
  Key technical concepts for modeling, monitoring, analyzing, and improving the performance of your business include monitor models, monitoring contexts, key performance indicator (KPI) contexts, business measures (which include metrics and KPIs), and triggers.
• Agile decision making capabilities
  IBM Business Monitor supports agile decision making by providing historical analysis, future prediction, and dynamic alerting capabilities. The KPI history functionality captures the values of key performance indicators (KPIs) over time. These values are analyzed using the KPI History and Prediction widget and this information becomes the basis for predicting the expected future values of the KPI. Alerts can be created directly from the dashboard to notify users of a current business situation or of potential problems or opportunities in the future.
• What's new in IBM Business Monitor V8.0.1
  IBM Business Monitor V8.0.1 includes enhancements to existing product capabilities.

Get started with IBM Business Monitor