MODEL FOR INTEGRATED MONITORING OF BPEL BUSINESS PROCESSES

Abstract

Business process execution language (BPEL) does not provide a native support for defining data and metrics, required to perform business activity monitoring (BAM). Existing industry solutions are vendor-specific while platform-independent scientific approaches separate tightly coupled monitoring definitions from the core BPEL processes into external descriptors, thus increasing the complexity of the development, packaging and deployment processes. Furthermore, existing monitoring solutions reuse platform-specific audit trail events. This requires monitor model developers to be familiar with the details of the process implementation and the custom BPEL engine meta-model. To overcome these issues, this paper presents bpelx4bam — a new approach to defining monitoring data and metrics within BPEL processes, based on BPEL extensions. The bpelx4bam promotes these definitions into the first class citizens of the BPEL specification in order to unify and fully integrate BAM into the BPM lifecycle. It enables a cross-platform migration of BAM-enabled business processes, removes the need for separate models and specifications, eases development, packaging and deployment processes, aligns the separation of concerns with actual process roles and introduces BAM-specific and optimized events. Therefore, it presents a solid ground for a future specification or a standard in this area.