Anyone for alerting infrastructure in BTS 2006 BAM?

I just finished attending a session on BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) in BizTalk 2006. There have been some great initiatives / developments around this infrastructure in BizTalk 2006. The most notable that I want to post about now is the ability to setup / define events and alerts. For example, lets imagine you have used the BAM tools to develop an observation model built around an Order Orchestration. One of the milestones that you built in this observation model is called “Purchase Order Denied” that effectively will report the number of Purchase Orders that go down the denied path of that orchestration. In BTS 2004 you could query / view the milestone metrics by looking at the Excel spreadsheet that the observation model was built on.

 

In BTS 2006, you can now also set an alert that people can subscribe to around that metric. For example, you could define an alert like… If the “Purchase Order Denied” milestone meets a particular criterion you define (e.g. “Purchase Order Denied > 10”) then alert the subscribers to that event (via email or other transport). If you alert via email, BAM 2006 generates an email with a link that the business users (subscribers) can then click on that takes them to a new BAM portal that allows them to view the details of that alert and drill down on the underlying data that generated that alert. This is really quite cool. It means the BAM model can now proactively notify subscribers to particular events occurring in the infrastructure. Clear as mud! (My interpretation of it anyway!).