BizTalk 2010 Recipes : Business Activity Monitoring - Using the BAM Portal

5/24/2011 11:28:57 AM

1. Problem

You need to create a solution that will track your company's business processes, compile the data into key performance indicators (KPIs), and develop a portal to display the information to executives. You have already created and deployed activities and views from a BAM worksheet to define and track the key performance indicators, and you would now like to consume that data from a portal.

2. Solution

Once you have developed and deployed BAM activities to track your KPIs, you may now consume the data from an ASP.NET portal without writing any code. You can accomplish this by utilizing out-of-the-box BizTalk reporting capabilities through the BAM portal. The BAM portal is a web-based portal built from ASP.NET that allows you to view and query cubed data created within the BAM framework. This recipe will cover three primary activities within the BAM portal:

Accessing the BAM portal
Performing an activity search
Viewing aggregations

NOTE

Installing the BAM Portal on 64-bit machines requires that IIS allow for 32-bit applications. This can be easily accomplished by running the following command line script: cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0.

2.1. Accessing the BAM Portal

Take the following steps to access the BAM portal:

Deploy BAM activities and views.
Open the portal by navigating to Start => All Programs => Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 => BAM Portal Web Site.
Once you have opened the portal, you will notice three primary panes: the header frame at the top, the view frame to the left, and the content frame to the right. If you have deployed activities and views, they will be available under the MyViews tree.

2.2. Performing an Activity Search

BAM activities capture business processes milestones and business data at a specific point in time. An activity search allows you to define, save, open, and execute queries to retrieve that transactional business data. The activity search page has three main sections, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Sections of Activity Search Page
Page Section	Description
Query	This section of the page allows you to define, save, and open queries. Queries let you constrain which activities to return in the results window.
Column Chooser	This section of the page defines which columns to return in the result set.
Results	The section of the page displays the result set retuned by executing the query against the BAM activity data.

To perform an activity search, take the following actions:

Under the My Views tree, expand the view that correlates to the view name you have deployed.
Expand the Activity Search node, and click a deployed activity. This action will open a query window like the window displayed in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Activity search query window
Within the Query pane, build a query by configuring one or more constraints. To configure a constraint, follow these steps:
1. Choose a field from the Business Data drop-down list.
2. Choose an operator from the Operator drop-down list.
3. Enter a value in the Value text box.
4. Click the Add button to insert additional constraints.
NOTE

You cannot create complex constraint logic, such as nested constraints. The portal will allow you to add constraints only with simple and/or relationships. By adding more than one constraint, an additional drop-down list will appear that will allow you to define the constraint relationship.
Within the Column Chooser pane, choose one or more columns to display in the Results pane.
Click Execute Query. The Results pane will display the query results.

2.3. Viewing Aggregations

Activity searches provide transactional business data from a specific point in time, and aggregations provide aggregated business data about a group of processes at a specific point in time. This aggregated data is processed and stored in OLAP cubes and accessed through pivot tables. The Aggregations page has two main sections, shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Sections of the Aggregations Page
Page Section	Description
Pivot Table View	Pivot tables provide for a way to summarize and work with data separate from the core spreadsheet. This section contains a standard pivot table. The table automatically points to the BAM framework and specifically the activities and views you have deployed.
Chart View	This section contains the chart view that displays, in chart form, the data filtering configured in the pivot table. It is also possible to change the chart view to any chart available through the office framework.

To view an aggregation, take the following actions in the BAM portal:

Under the My Views tree, expand the view that correlates to the deployed view name.
Expand the Aggregations node, and click a deployed pivot table. This action will open a window like the one displayed in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Aggregations page

NOTE

If the BAM portal displays the "Safety settings on this machine prohibit accessing a data source on another domain" error in the pivot table, you need to change your security settings for Internet Explorer. Open the security settings by selecting the Tools => Internet Options menu in Internet Explorer. Select the Security tab, and then click the Custom button. Once you are prompted with the Security Settings dialog box, locate the Miscellaneous heading, and select the Enable option for the Access Data Sources Across Domains choice. Finally, you will receive an error if no data exists in the cube.
From the pivot table View toolbar, click the Field Chooser icon. This will display a list of fields available with your BAM view.
Drag one or more total or detail fields to the center of the pivot table.
Next, drag one or more column fields to the column section of the pivot table.
Close the Pivot Table Field List control. Figure 3 shows what the pivot table with data should look like.

Figure 3. Aggregations view

NOTE

The pivot table is a powerful tool, and this recipe does not go into the many features it provides. You should spend some time researching what this tool can provide and how to use it to its full potential.

3. How It Works

The BAM portal is a feature in BizTalk 2010 that facilitates the rapid consumption of business transactional and aggregated data, without writing any code. The portal is self-configuring, fairly easy to set up, and provides rich data retrieval capabilities. This recipe has provided a high-level understanding of what you can do with the portal, but it has an additional powerful feature, BAM alerts. BAM alerts allow you to configure and receive alerts related to specific changes in business data.

The BAM portal provides several areas of configuration: the look and feel of the main or dashboard page, the web.config file, a network load balancing (NLB) clustering. By default, the main dashboard, or Getting Started page, displays navigation instructions to the user. The content for the main dashboard page is located in the MainPageContent.htm file, which is located in the root of the BAM portal web site folder and can be altered.

Another area of configuration is web.config. This configuration file is similar to standard web.config files and allows you to configure security as well as environment settings for the BAM portal. The web.config setting highlights include referencing the BAM web services that may be hosted on different machines in a distributed environment, referencing a different main dashboard page file, culture support, and service timeout configuration. Additionally, the types of alert notifications are customizable in web.config.

Finally, BAM fully supports high availability through clustering and can be scaled like other web applications through NLB. Please refer to the help file for specific instructions about how to change these settings.