I have to confess -- the first time I saw a demo of IBM's Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM), I was totally impressed. Its ability to give you levels of visibility into your application performance has enormous implications on how you diagnose and fix performance issues. Need to improve your SLAs? Set up alerts to notify you before the help desk is flooded with calls. Are some transactions taking much longer than they should? ITCAM lets you deep dive to find out if it is the server, the database or some other issue. From within the tool, you can even examine the performance of EJBs and method calls. Since ITCAM arms you with information, you can assign the task to the specific group or SME in charge of the problem. Since I saw my first ITCAM demo , the tools have continued to evolve so that they now encompass MQ channels.

On the business process side, Business Activity Monitoring lets you create dashboards that report on your business processes. Giving you real-time updates on how your business is performing with dashboards that can be customized based on your role. Business analysts need access to the tasks, the workflow and the business rules affecting business processes. Executives need real-time reporting capabilities.

Tomorrow the discussion on Business Activity Monitoring will continue with the presentation on Business Events. Join us for Where is SOA Going: Web 2.0, Business Events, Virtualization, Information On Demand. See you then!