IBM FileNet P8, Version 5.2.1            

Best practices for monitoring BPM using WebSphere Business Monitor

Review these best practices for using the BPM Monitor Model for WebSphere® and BPM common base event adapter for IBM® WebSphere Business Monitor for monitoring BPM using 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 Process Start Time of the event is greater than Deploy DateTime of the Monitor Model. For example,
Activity_Locked/extendedData/processStartTime > dateTime('2011-07-31T14:47:27-07:00')

The dateTime represents 31 July 2011 at 2:47 and 27 seconds PM. Subtract 7 from UTC - Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) or Mountain Standard Time (MST).

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

Where
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 Saving Time (DST).
This setting specifies that processes that start after the specified time only 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 database 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 the P8.BPM.Base event. Before using it in the monitor model, add it to the Extended Data section as a child element of businessData.
Add user-defined fields (UDF) for monitoring - monitor model When adding a user-defined field for monitoring, use the exact Inbound Event to set its value. For example, if you have CreditApproved user-defined field 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

Workflow system

Workflows should be allowed to terminate when all work is complete.

Some customers keep the workflow active 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 database tables. If workflows are never terminated, the tables corresponding to processes and 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 workflow system 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. See the WebSphere Business Monitor online documentation for details on how to prune the table.

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.



Last updated: October 2015
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