At Collaborate 09, I presented Bam! We Have Integration - Using SOA Suite, ODI, and BAM To Monitor Your Integration Layer.
To briefly recap, the presentation was divided into three core sections:
SOA and the Oracle SOA Product Set
Leveraging Oracle BAM
Integrating BPEL, ESB, and ODI to BAM
As my session was scheduled on the last hour of the last day of the conference, so I definitely wanted to extend a big thanks to everyone who decided to stick around and attend my presentation.
SOA and the Oracle SOA Product Set
Implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can address several business and technical challenges. The beginning of the presentation focused on describing why you would want to implement a SOA Integration Layer, particularly addressing requirements such as process management, integration, transformation, routing, workflow, and bulk data load. The cost of maintaining point-to-point integrations are drastically reduced. Reports that are run against your data warehouse include data as old as 10 minutes versus the traditional 24 hours. This is where BPEL Process Manager, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and Oracle Data Integrator can be used to solve your SOA needs.
Supporting transformation and routing via ESB
Tools have been developed to allow the monitoring of this SOA Integration Layer, such as OEM Grid Control; primarily designed for system level monitoring. Unfortunately, there is no visibility into the business process itself. The BPEL and ESB consoles are not designed for operations administration, and as the number of instances grow into the tens of thousands, business monitoring becomes challenging.
What if you wanted to know how sales this quarter compared to the last? If your transaction consisted of multiple integrations, how can you determine which of those integrations is performing slowly? What percentage of orders are failing due to business errors (e.g., not enough inventory) versus system errors (e.g., server unavailable)?
This is where BAM comes into play. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) enables you to proactively monitor business processes in real-time and can generate alerts based on business conditions. This allows you to identify bottlenecks, streamline and optimize processes, and deliver executive management dashboards with real-time data.
Integrating BPEL, ESB, and ODI to BAM
In this section, I walked through 3 use cases, describing in detail how and why you would integrate BPEL, ESB, and ODI to BAM. These are too lengthy to go through here, and you'll see them in the future as blog entries under the SOA Suite tag.
Configuring a BAM Sensor Action for a BPEL process
In summary, BPEL, ESB, and ODI are powerful technologies. However, in high-volume, mission critical environments, you should consider how you intend on monitoring your business processes and integrations. Thus, Oracle BAM can be used to complement the toolsets in your SOA Integration Layer.
To learn more or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Ahmed Aboulnaga
Application Integration Manager
aaboulnaga@itconvergence.com
Missed Collaborate 09?
Attendance was light at Collaborate 09. If you wanted to be in Orlando but could not, don't lose heart. IT Convergence is making the white papers presented by our functional, technical, and business leaders available on our Collaborate 09 page. You can also click here follow the event as it happened through the eyes of our Collaborate 09 blogging team.
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