New BizTalk Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Guidance

  • Article

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a module in BizTalk that captures business data and process milestones to allows business decision makers to gain insight of their in-flight processes.  Using BI tools to derive up-to-date metrics and key performance indicators from the BAM databases, users can forecast process trends and monitor processes in real-time. BAM also provides a mechanism to alert users to situations that require their intervention to prevent undesirable outcome or to encourage a beneficial result.

We have released last week a new whitepaper and code samples targeted at developers who are developing BAM solutions. The whitepaper titled “Business Activity Monitoring in Depth for Developers” covers the following topics:

  • Business Activity Monitoring Overview – including the BAM observation model and how to define it
  • Using BAM to instrument events from applications – programmatically and declaratively
  • An overview and detailed description of the BAM infrastructure
  • Retrieving BAM data through various BI tools
  • Extending the BAM API with a RESTful services

The paper was authored by Jesus Rodriguez and Joe Klug from Microsoft’s partner Tellago. Jesus has included some more background information and acknowledgments for on his blog.

If you are looking into implementing a BAM solution using the BizTalk Server infrastructure I strongly recommend reading this paper and testing the sample code provided with it. The online version is available on MSDN, however for the full Word version and sample code you may want to download it.

Enjoy it,

Ofer