Business activity monitoring refers to aggregating, analyzing and presenting information about business activities. This definition is paramount when designing a solution to address a business activity monitoring use case. Aggregation refers to the collection of data, analysis to the manipulation of data to extract information, and presentation refers to representing this data visually or in other ways such as alerts. The WSO2 BAM architecture reflects this natural flow in its very design.

BAM architecture

BAM Architecture

The BAM architecture can be broken down into four main modules:

Data that needs to be monitored goes through these modules in order. The data flow is as follows;

Data will be sent from the data agent to the BAM server,
The Data Receiver will process and store the received data in the Cassandra data store.
Then, the Analyzer Engine will start to analyze this data according to defined analytic queries. This will usually follow a pattern of retrieving the data from the data store, performing some sort of data operation such as an addition and storing it back in a data store. This data store can be different from the Cassandra data store. The data operations will happen locally if the Analyzer Engine is not pointed to a Hadoop cluster.
Finally, the dashboard or reports will query the data store for the analyzed data and show it in the UI.

WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (BAM) is designed to address a wide range of monitoring requirements in business activities and processes. It is a flexible framework allowing to model your own key performance indicators to suit different stakeholders, may it be business users, dev ops, CxOs etc. WSO2 BAM achieves this level of flexibility, while facilitating technologies such as Big Data storage, Big Data analytics and high performance data transfer.

SOA encourages systems to expose business functions as services. It is required to start monitoring these exposed services in order to gain insight and transparency to business activities. By plugging into services, data can be harnessed as valuable information. But, the amount of information that is flowing through an organization's systems is enormous. Therefore, all this data needs to be collected and processed by a system capable of handling Big Data loads, capable of handling data volumes of TeraBytes or even PetaBytes with relative ease. WSO2 BAM is designed to be significantly scalable to sustain large amounts of corporate data loads when aggregating, analyzing and presenting data. This is another reason why WSO2 BAM is a best-fit for businesses.

Next, refer to BAM Features.