Best practices for monitoring BPM using IBM WebSphere Business Monitor

This topic recommends best practices for using the BPM Monitor Model for WebSphere and BPM CBE Adaptor for WebSphere Business Monitor for monitoring BPM using IBM WebSphere Business Monitor.

BPM Monitor Model for WebSphere

The BPM Monitor Model for WebSphere should be customized in the following way:

Customization Usage
Inbound Event Filter Configure the event filter for each inbound event so that the event’s Process Start Time is greater than Monitor Model’s Deploy DateTime. For example,

Activity_Locked/extendedData/processStartTime > dateTime('2007-07-31T14:47:27-07:00')

The dateTime above represents 31 July 2007 at 2:47 and 27 seconds PM. Subtract 7 from UTC - Pacific Daylight or Mountain Standard.

The format of the dateTime is as follows:   yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss-zz:zz

Where

Symbol Meaning
yyyy-mm-dd Year, month, day separated by hyphens. Single digits must be padded with zero.
T Time separator
hh:mm:ss Hour, minutes, seconds separated by colons
+ or - Timezone operator - add or subtract the timezone value from UTC.
zz:zz Timezone from UTC. Account for daylight savings time.

For additional information see www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime

This setting specifies that only processes that start after the specified time will be considered by the monitor model. This avoids the problem of trying to evaluate processes that were started before the monitor model was deployed. Trying to evaluate such processes would cause errors since the monitor would most likely have missed some of the events that were emitted by the process.

TIP You can make this change very quickly in the xml view by searching and replacing all instances of the 'MMInstallTime' text with the dateTime() value.

Recurring wait time trigger Use this trigger for updating stopwatch related metrics. Set the interval to be the same or less than the monitor db replication interval to ensure that each time the replication interval is reached, the trigger will already have fired again. The default replication interval is 5 minutes.
Add user-defined fields (UDF) for monitoring - event definitions

Always add the user defined field to P8.BPM.Base event.  Before using it in the monitor model, add it to the ExtendedData section as a child element of businessData.

Add UDF for monitoring - monitor model

When adding UDF for monitoring, use the exact Inbound Event to set its value. For example, if you have “CreditApproved” UDF in your process and you know its value will be set at the end of step Credit Approval, in the monitor model, you should reference the Inbound Event “BPM Activity End” in its value map, for example, “Activity_End/extendedData/businessData/CreditApproved”

Process Engine software

Workflows running on Process Engine should be allowed to terminate when all work is complete.

Some customers keep the workflow alive even when all work relating to it is complete in order to maintain records of past activities—corresponding statistical information is kept in the monitor's database tables. If workflows are never terminated, the tables corresponding to processes/activities gradually grow to millions of rows. At that point the monitor spends more time inserting and updating the database tables, and eventually the Monitor server fails to keep up with the rate of events that the Process Engine server generates.  Therefore, it is best to terminate the workflow once it is complete and use a different mechanism to maintain records of the completed workflows.

DB2 database for monitor server

The database administrator should periodically delete the terminated workflows and work items from the Monitor database. If the table is not pruned regularly, the size of the database will ultimately slow the performance of the Monitor server. Refer to WebSphere Business Monitor Information center for detail on how to prune the table.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/dmndhelp/v6rxmx/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.btools.help.monitor.doc/Doc/tasks/dbServices/db_del_data.html

 

BPM Monitoring Dashboard for WebSphere Business Monitor

The BPM Monitor Model for WebSphere is intended to monitor “work in progress” (that is, active workflows and work items). Therefore, all the views (dimensional, KPI,  …) must use “TerminationTime” as a dimension and show only data based on “TerminationTime= 9999”.