BAM delivers real-time visibility into business health to ensure that service-level agreements, business commitments, and customer expectations are being met. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Application Integration and Platform Middleware, 2006, “Business activity monitoring is the only technology… rated as high impact – enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise...”
SL’s Enterprise RTView is considered one of the most comprehensive and flexible BAM platforms available. Philip Howard of Bloor Research concludes in his recent product review, “Enterprise RTView is arguably the most versatile product that we have seen in the BAM/Operational BI space, as well as the most extensive. It is not only comprehensive in terms of its platform, but it is also extremely flexible and easy-to-use both for the developer and the end-user. As the product becomes more widely known, we expect it to represent the benchmark against which other such products are measured.”
What Does SL’s BAM Solution Provide?
Enterprise RTView provides:
- Monitoring and updating of business and operational metrics/KPIs, enabling users to evaluate conditions in real time
- Real-time aggregation and analytics of data and events from virtually any source
- Real-time vs. historical analysis for business context.
- Visibility
- Meaningful, customizable dashboards that present information in exactly the way each business analyst team needs to see it
- Drill-down capabilities to solve problems before they become critical
- Customizable alerts and reports in a wide variety of formats, notifying the right people more quickly
- Integration with existing infrastructure software to further speed problem-solving
- Pre-defined corrective actions
How It Works
BAM requirements can span a spectrum of complexity, ranging from simple data streams to complex event analysis. For applications where complex event processing and correlation are not required, Enterprise RTView can access data directly, apply real-time in-memory analytics, and provide customized visualization. For more complex applications, Enterprise RTView can be used in conjunction with a number of partner CEP and middleware solutions and will provide a high performance, interactive visualization layer with flexible client-side analytic capability.
BAM vs. BSM
For SL, the delineation between BAM and BSM (Business Services Management) is becoming increasingly blurred. BAM, in its purest definition, monitors and provides visibility into business metrics such as KPIs or SLAs, whereas BSM monitors the IT services and process that support the business. However, for many companies, IT infrastructure is so critical to their business, IT SLAs are business SLAs. And increasingly, business analysts are as concerned about IT performance as they are with their KPIs. As such, while many see these as separate categories, we at SL believe they will merge into a broader category that is indifferent to the classification of either the data coming in, nor the information being presented and acted upon.
BAM vs. CEP
At SL, we believe the marriage between CEP and BAM approaches the holy grail of real-time visibility. However, we do see BAM (and BSM, for that matter) as a separate platform that consumes and further analyzes the output of CEP engines, along with other information across the enterprise. There is an advantage to being able to iterate or overhaul your visibility layer without touching anything in the event or process layer. And there is a further advantage in that BAM introduces a human element to CEP which otherwise is highly automated and non-interpreted. We’re honored to be embedded and serve as the real-time visibility platform for almost every major CEP engine provider.
Summary of Enterprise RTView BAM Capabilities
- Real-time in-memory analytics provide support for more than 60 functions and aggregations
- Interface to build custom analytics and functions
- Pre-built monitoring applications for TIBCO and JMS Messaging Oriented Middleware (MOM), JMX, and Oracle Coherence Data Grid Monitoring
- A Data Historian which enables the persistence of real-time data and events to any relational database. This supports the presentation of real-time information with historical context.
- Complementary fit with CEP applications, providing interactive visualization and user-parameterized analytics
- Delivery of actionable information in the form of real-time dashboards, reports, and alerts
- Integration with a number of enterprise datasources including:
- XML streams and files
- Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP) engines
- Messaging Oriented Middleware (MOM)
- JMX
- Relational databases
- Log files
- RRD
- Splunk
- Oracle Coherence
- Radware InFlight
- Custom Datasources via a Custom Data Source API
- JMS
- OLAP
- Excel
