Business Activity Monitoring, or BAM, provides real-time business intelligence by capturing data as it flows through a business system. By using BAM, you can monitor a business process in real time and generate alerts when the process needs human intervention. Pro Business Activity Monitoring in BizTalk 2009 focuses on Microsoft's BAM tools, which provide a flexible infrastructure that captures data from Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, .NET applications, and BizTalk Server.

This book shows why BAM is an important component of any BI strategy because it bridges the gap between BI and business process management.

• Part One of the book covers the basics of BAM. It teaches you how to install BAM, and then it leads you through a complete but simple project to capture data from a WCF service
• Part Two of the book describes the BAM toolset. It shows you how to define the data that is captured by BAM, wire up a BizTalk application for BAM, and view BAM data using the BAM Portal
• Part Three of the book focuses on monitoring applications written in WCF or WF. It also shows you how to use the BAM API
• Part Four of the book covers advanced topics in BAM. These topics include integrating BAM with Microsoft's BI stack, creating relationships between BAM activities, managing BAM servers, and monitoring BizTalk applications using BAM

This book contains numerous exercises to help you learn BAM. Source code for the samples is available from Apress.com.

For many CIOs, BI is top on their priority lists. Learn why with Pro Business Activity Monitoring in BizTalk 2009.

What you’ll learn

• Show users what your application is doing and how their business
• Implement a BAM solution without writing any code
• Monitor applications written in WCF, WF, and BizTalk Server
• Create an observation model to define the data that BAM will collect from your application
• Use the BAM API to implement custom BAM solutions
• Manage a BAM solution
• Integrate BAM with your BI strategy and Microsoft's BI tools

Who is this book for?


This book is for anyone who wants to know what's happening in their organization, right now!

Developers building WCF, WF, or BizTalk applications will learn how to monitor those applications without writing extra code. Architects will learn how to bridge service-oriented architecture, business process management, and BI. Decision makers will learn how to see what's happening inside business processes. BI specialists will learn how BAM provides real-time capabilities that supplement any BI strategy. Business users and analysts will learn how BAM allows them to understand what's happening in the business every minute of every day.

About the Apress Pro Series


The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard–won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

Customer Reviews & Comments
This is a extremely well-written, easy to understand investigation of a topic long overdue for a more public unveiling. Long the secret tool of a BizTalk developer, BAM has never really stretched outside the BizTalk shadow despite its ability to support a wide range of input clients (WF, WCF, custom .NET code). This book is organized in a way that first introduces the concepts and use cases of Business Activity Monitoring and then transitions into how to actually accomplish things with Microsoft BAM platform. The book closes with an architectural assessment that describes how BAM really works. Early in the book, the authors looked at a number of situations (B2B, B2C, CSC, SOA, ESB, BPM, and mashups) and explained the relevance of BAM in each. This was a wise way to encourage the reader to think about BAM for more than just straight BizTalk solutions. It also showcases the value of capturing business metrics across applications and tiers. The examples in the book were excellent, and one nice touch I liked was after the VERY first "build a BAM solution" demonstration, there was a solid section explaining how to troubleshoot the various things that might have gone wrong. Given how many times the first demonstration goes wrong for a reader, this was a very thoughtful addition and indicative of the care given to this topic by the authors. You'll also find a quite thorough quest to explain how to use the WCF and WF BAM interceptors including descriptions of key configuration attributes in addition to numerous examples of those configurations in action. The book goes to great lengths to try and shine a light on aspects of BAM that may have been poorly understood and it offers concrete ways to address them. You'll find suggestions for how to manage the numerous BAM solution artifacts, descriptions of the databases and tables that make up a BAM installation and it is one of the only places you can find a clear write up of the flow of data driven by the SSIS/DTS packages. The authors also talk about topics such as relationships and continuations which may have not been clear to developers in the past. What else will you find here? You'll see how to create all sorts of observation models in Excel, how to exploit the BAM portal or use other reporting environments, how to use either the TPE or the BAM API to feed the BAM interceptors, a well explained discussion on archiving, and how to encourage organizational acceptance and adoption of BAM. I'd contend that if this book came out in 2005 (which it could have, given that there have only been a few core changes to the offering since then), you'd see BAM as a mainstream option for Microsoft-based activity monitoring. That didn't happen, so countless architects and developers have missed out on a pretty sophisticated architecture that is fairly easy to use. Will this book change all that? Probably not, but if you are a BizTalk architect today, or simply find the idea of flexibly modeling, capturing and reporting key business indicators to be compelling, you really should read this book.

Back To Top