Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Monitoring service activities
Moving down the line of SOA patterns that are used in core technology frameworks, we fi-
nally come to Business Activity Monitoring; this term was proposed by Gartner during the
earlier years of SOA development. Actually, this term has no relation to any recognized
SOA pattern (with the exception of
UI Mediator
, but very remotely), but every Oracle-
technology-related book (related or not related to SOA) has a chapter dedicated to BAM.
You can find them a lot in chapter 19 of the topic by Lucas Jellema, which has already been
recommended. It's quite typical that you will find guidance on BAM somewhere around the
final chapters of this topic. Quite interestingly, it contradicts the common corporate pur-
chase practice; usually, BAM is purchased first and implemented in the end.
Why is that? It's quite obvious; top managers love the dashboards full of colorful 3D pie
charts, but development teams have to go a very long way before something really useful
becomes available for visualization, and that has nothing to do with BAM. Those of us who
remember the earlier versions of BAM could also be rather hesitant. It was built on the Mi-
crosoft platform with lots of bugs and integration problems with core Oracle SOA
products, and worked with the IE browser only. It does not always leave happy memories
(and we are not discussing the license costs compared to other products here).
Oracle's early BAM problems and dependence on Microsoft have long gone, and now if
you are contemplating using a monitoring tool for your SOA/BI portfolio, the Oracle BAM
can be a good alternative to Nagios, for instance. Again, as its main purpose is very
straightforward, that is, to construct reports and visualize them in a push-based manner (no
manual refreshes should be required), it does not provide any pattern as a solution to any
problem; however, it is arguably the best candidate to complete the extremely powerful tri-
ad:
• Complex Event Processing on Oracle EPN
• Events/message distribution, aggregation, and reliable replication by Oracle Coher-
ence
• Business events' reporting by Oracle BAM
Frankly, if any of your business cases is similar to the banking, logistic, or telecom ex-
amples discussed earlier, this triad with all the available patterns will cover most of your
needs (or all in our experience). BAM in this case from the earliest 11
g
build provides a
web-based graphical environment for establishing a completely codeless implementation of
reports and dashboards to monitor different KPIs, primarily business-related ones. This
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