Real World Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) using BizTalk 2010 part 1

In all my years working with BizTalk, my current employer is the first that I've had a real requirement for using Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).  From a high level, we needed to provide the business with a real time view of all the different messages coming into and out of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) environment.  Additionally, the business wanted to see some high level statistics of these messages like volume throughput, average size, and average time.

To meet these requirements, we used two different solutions.  BizTalk BAM tracking was used to track the receiving and sending of each different type of message in the ESB.  The second solution was a custom ASP.NET web site to display the information in a consolidated manner for  the business users.  I'll explain why we didn't use the out of the box BAM monitoring portal in a subsequent post.

As I've mentioned in some previous posts, the current BizTalk environment I work in performs a lot of content based routing for messaging.  When looking at a way to monitor all of the messages, it made sense to leverage BAM tracking.  This not only allowed the tracking of all the different individual messages, but it also provided a means of tracking specific information related to each message.   Below is a screen shot of the web site that is displayed to the user:

From looking at the above screen shot, the intent of the web page is to display a high level view of the different messages moving through the ESB.  The information presented to the user on the site is based mostly off of the views created with BAM tracking.  Each row shown above identifies a different subscriber to a particular message publication.  While meeting the requirements of the business, it also gives some indicators to the health of each individual message in the ESB.  *Note: Credit must be given to my then manager Darrick Johnson for creating the original web site.

My next post will walk through the "how to" of creating the tracking for an individual message. In my last post, I will look into more specifics of how the ESB monitor is organized and what it provides for the users.