Business Activity Monitoring

BAM is typically used for bringing BizTalk to the world, in the sense that it is often somewhat transparent to the outside world what goes on inside BizTalk. If errors occur in BizTalk, these will be handled both by BizTalk and the operators, but what about all the stuff that did not fail? BAM is typically used to show just that.

Here are some examples of questions that BAM could provide answers to:

• How many orders did we receive last month?

• Was the order with ID 1005 ever received, and when did BizTalk send it to the ERP system?

Out of the box, there is no easy way of supplying these answers to the business outside BizTalk. By using the built-in tracking, we could give the answers, but that would both be very tedious, and would require a field, such as OrderID, to be promoted (see Chapter 2, Developing BizTalk Artifacts – Creating Schemas and Pipelines, for more information about promotions).

BAM, on the other hand, can do all this easily without requiring certain...