Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides ability to create real time dashboards. BAM can act as a centralized monitoring framework across enterprise application integrations. It can pull data from critical points of the business process flow and display those KPIs in real time reports/alerts. With this post I would like to show how simple it is to integrate BAM with BPEL processes (won't get into step wise details for same as there are Tutorials available on OTN and web for the same) . There are 2 ways of integration BAM with BPEL in SOA 11g:
Designing the data object is critical because that determines what exact fields we want to capture from BPEL and send it across to the BAM Active Data Cache.
Next step is to navigate to the BAM Active Studio and create your real time report using the Data Object created above. Active Studio provides various report templates which you can incorporate to build interactive real time dashboards like Pie-Charts, Bar Graphs etc. Based on the requirement these can be designed.
Once the report is ready and saved, next step is configuring the BAM adapter on the Weblogic Admin console of the SOA server where BPEL code runs (assuming BAM and SOA are running on different servers).
Once saved, redeploy the BAM adapter for the changes to take effect.
BAM sensor action defines what kind of operation we want to perform. Here we are sending the data to the BAM Data Object created earlier (establish a connection to the BAM server from Jdeveloper to access the DO). The Mapper file maps elements from the BAM sensor variable to the Data Object fields.
These reports have additional capabilities which can be enabled on them like Drill Down feature which lets you click on the Pie Chart/Bar graph and get additional details about that specific data set.
BAM is a very powerful and useful feature available from the Oracle SOA stack and can help in setting up Enterprise wide monitoring framework. Hope this post provides a basic understanding of how it can be easily implemented in SOA based integrations.
- Using BAM adapter
- Using Sensor/Sensor Action inside BPEL.
First and foremost login to your BAM console (http://hostname:port/OracleBAM ) and navigate to the BAM Architect to create the Data Object.
Designing the data object is critical because that determines what exact fields we want to capture from BPEL and send it across to the BAM Active Data Cache.
Next step is to navigate to the BAM Active Studio and create your real time report using the Data Object created above. Active Studio provides various report templates which you can incorporate to build interactive real time dashboards like Pie-Charts, Bar Graphs etc. Based on the requirement these can be designed.
Once the report is ready and saved, next step is configuring the BAM adapter on the Weblogic Admin console of the SOA server where BPEL code runs (assuming BAM and SOA are running on different servers).
On Admin console, navigate to Deployments-OracleBAMAdapter - Configuration - Outbound Connection
Pools and expand oracle.bam.adapter.adc.RMIConnectionFactory and click on eis/bam/rmi (you can use your own JNDI name instead of using the default JNDI).
Once saved, redeploy the BAM adapter for the changes to take effect.
Next step is to move to Jdeveloper and open the BPEL code in the Monitor perspective. Create a BAM sensor variable and assign a sensor action to the same. Inside the orchestration flow you can assign appropriate values to the BAM sensor variable.
BAM sensor action defines what kind of operation we want to perform. Here we are sending the data to the BAM Data Object created earlier (establish a connection to the BAM server from Jdeveloper to access the DO). The Mapper file maps elements from the BAM sensor variable to the Data Object fields.
Once the code is deployed and BPEL instances are initiated you can navigate back to BAM console and click on Active Viewer - Select your report and watch it get updated in Real-Time with data sent from BPEL. Below is a sample custom report created based on the above Data Object.
These reports have additional capabilities which can be enabled on them like Drill Down feature which lets you click on the Pie Chart/Bar graph and get additional details about that specific data set.
Apart from these custom reports, BAM also ships with an Out-Of-The-Box report feature called Monitor Express which helps in real time composite instance monitoring. Single click enablement from Jdeveloper by switching to Monitor perspective of .bpel file and selecting Monitor Configuration from top left and selecting the specific mode we want to monitor. We can monitor scope level activities or entire BPEL level.
The setup steps which need to be done from back end (BAM server) are :
- Edit the SOA_HOME/bam/config/BAMICommandConfig.xml and set below 4 properties
- ICommand_Default_User_Name
- ICommand_Default_Password
- ADCServerName
- ADCServerPort
- Next navigate to SOA_HOME/bam/samples/bam/monitorexpress/bin
- Set JAVA_HOME and run the setup.sh. This script will load the required reports and data objects for the Monitor express dashboard.
You should see something similar to below once this is enabled at runtime.It helps to find how many instances completed/faulted, average processing time of the composites, fault details etc.
BAM is a very powerful and useful feature available from the Oracle SOA stack and can help in setting up Enterprise wide monitoring framework. Hope this post provides a basic understanding of how it can be easily implemented in SOA based integrations.
