IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Measuring and improving business processes > Monitoring > Service component monitoring overview

How do you enable monitoring?

There are several methods that you can use to specify service component event points for monitoring, depending on the type of monitoring you are planning to do.

Performance statistics

For Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) statistics, use the administrative console to specify the particular event points and their associated performance measurements that you want to monitor. After you start monitoring service component performance, the generated statistics are published at certain intervals to the Tivoli Performance Viewer. You can use this viewer to watch the results as they occur on your system, and, optionally, log the results to a file that can be later viewed and analyzed within the same viewer.

For Application Response Measurement (ARM) statistics, use the administrative console Request Metrics section to specify and the statistics you want to monitor.

Common Base Events for problem determination and business process monitoring

You can specify, at the time you create an application, to monitor service component event points, along with a certain level of detail for those events, on a continual basis after the application is deployed on a running server. You can also select event points to monitor after the application has been deployed and the events invoked at least once. In both cases, the events generated by monitoring are fired across the Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) bus. These events can be published to a log file, or to a configured CEI Server database.

The CEI Server database is not configured by default; you must manually configure this database if you want to use it. Be aware that using the CEI Server database in a production environment can result in degraded performance.

IBM BPM supports two types of Common Base Event enablement for problem determination and business process monitoring:

Static

Certain events points within an application and their level of detail can be tagged for monitoring using Integration Designer tools. The selections indicate what event points are to be continuously monitored, and are stored in a file with a .mon extension that is distributed and deployed along with the application. When IBM BPM has been configured to use a CEI server, the monitoring function begins firing service component events to a CEI server whenever the specified services are invoked. As long as the application is deployed on IBM BPM, the service component event points specified in the .mon file is constantly monitored until the application is stopped. You can specify additional events to be monitored in a running application, and increase the detail level for event points that are already monitored. But while that application remains active you cannot stop, or lower the detail level of, the monitored event points specified by the .mon of the deployed application.

Dynamic

If additional event points need to be monitored during the processing of an application without shutting down the server, then you can use dynamic monitoring. Use the administrative console to specify service component event points for monitoring, and set detail level for the payload that will be included in the Common Base Event. A list is compiled of the event points that have been reached by a processed service component after the server was started. Choose from this list individual event points or groups of event points for monitoring, with the service component events directed either to the logger or to the CEI server database.

The primary purpose of the Dynamic enablement is for creating correlated service component events that are published to logs, which allow you to perform problem determination on services. Service component events can be large, depending on how much data is being requested, and can tax database resources if you choose to send events to the CEI server. Consequently, you should publish dynamically monitored events to the CEI server only if you need to read the business data of the events, or if you otherwise need to keep a database record of the events. If, however, you are monitoring a particular session, then you need to use the CEI server database to access the service component events related to that session.

Service component monitoring overview

Related concepts:
Monitoring performance
Session monitoring

Related tasks:
Viewing events with the Common Base Event browser:
Administer Common Event Infrastructure:
Enabling Common Base Events and the audit trail, using the administrative console
Getting performance data from request metrics