Business monitoring concepts

Business measures, metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and business measures models are key concepts to model, monitor, analyze, and improve the performance of your business.

WebSphere® Business Monitor helps to monitor and manage your business operations and systems.

When you plan to monitor a certain area of your business to assess its efficiency, identify problems, and improve performance, you first determine what performance indicators will give you the information you need. These performance indicators are called business measures. Business measures describe the performance management aspects of your business that are required for real-time business monitoring.

Evaluating the business measures of your processes is crucial for achieving your business objectives. The performance of processes is evaluated against the values of metrics, KPIs, counters, and stopwatches. The values of these business measures provide extensive information about performance.

A metric is a measurement of a process or process element (task, reusable subprocess, etc.) that is used to assess business performance. A metric can be used alone or in combination with other metrics to define the calculation for a KPI, which measures performance against a business objective. A metric is defined within a specific process using WebSphere Business Modeler. The value of that metric is captured and evaluated using WebSphere Business Monitor. A metric can have numeric values, such as the duration of a process, or non-numeric values, such as the delivery dates of shipments. Examples of business metrics are: a supplier’s average response time and the cost of the risk assessment step in an insurance process.

A KPI is a business measure that is made up of one or more metrics. It is associated with a specific process and can have upper or lower limits, or both, forming a range, value, or performance target that the process should achieve. A KPI is generally represented by a numeric value. In other words, a KPI is a metric with limits, and is itself made up of one or more metrics. An example of a simple KPI is the average time for response to a customer inquiry is less than two business days. A more complicated KPI would take the form of detailed specifications, such as the shipment duration of a delivery process where the order date should be tracked against the delivery date and monitored when the average time to shipment is within a 20% range of a five-business-days target.

Counters and stopwatches are specialized metrics that measure the number of occurrences of a situation or an event. They are defined within the business measures model to keep track of these numbers. Counters can track, for example, the number of the instances of the order-processing process per day. Stopwatches can track, for example, the time since the order-processing process started.

Metrics, KPIs, counters, and stopwatches are defined within the context of the Business Measures editor WebSphere Business Modeler. They are then evaluated and measured by WebSphere Business Monitor. To compare expected business performance levels with actual results, WebSphere Business Monitor exports the business measures back to WebSphere Business Modeler.

For each process, WebSphere Business Modeler can create a business measures model. A business measures model is a container that carries information about what is monitored and the business measures that are monitored in it. The user of the Business Measures editor WebSphere Business Modeler decides which processes to monitor, whether to monitor their subprocesses, and what business measures to use. The user creates a business measures model and then exports it to WebSphere Business Monitor. The model carries all defined business measures (metrics, KPIs, counters and stopwatches) in the process as well as its subprocesses.

WebSphere Business Monitor receives the business measures model. Based on the imported business measures model, WebSphere Business Monitor provides two levels of monitoring: one for the process and the other for the process instances.

Based on the business measures in the imported model,WebSphere Business Monitor applies real-time monitoring for each process instance. For example, the order cost (business measure) could be measured for the order-processing process. If there are three instances of the process, then the order cost would be generally different for each process instance as follows:
WebSphere Business Monitor can further monitor the process as a whole by applying aggregations over each of its process instances. For example, in the order-processing process, the average order cost (business measure) could be measured. If there are three instances of the process, WebSphere Business Monitor checks the order cost across all instances of the process and calculates the average as follows:

WebSphere Business Monitor can perform aggregate calculations across process instances only if the user of the Business Measures editor specifies KPIs for that process. When exporting the business measures model from WebSphere Business Modeler to WebSphere Business Monitor, an implicit aggregate process is created. It is appended with the “Aggregates” name to indicate that the KPIs within that process are only intended to be measured across the process instances to provide a measurement value for the process as a whole.

Some views in WebSphere Business Monitor are designed to make aggregate calculations over the instances of the process at runtime. They are the Gauges, Scorecards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) views.

The Active Instances view evaluates both the process instances and the process.

The Export Values view extracts certain business measures values and exports them back to WebSphere Business Modeler to close the cycle of modeling, monitoring, analyzing and improving business performance.


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