A practical approach for the operational level monitoring of executable business process implemented by BPEL

Abstract

Operational level monitoring of business process by business users is a key requirement for enterprises to improve business processes' visibility and efficiency. Nowadays more and more enterprise business processes are implemented by BPEL(Business Process Execution Language). Even though BPEL engine is often provided with monitoring capability, it is primarily designed to support problem determination and debugging for system administrators or developers. Business users can hardly leverage these capabilities to monitor the process at operational level. This paper introduces an approach to easily enable the operational level monitoring of business process implemented by BPEL. Operational level monitoring takes out execution status information of a process instance and renders them into an operational view for business user to track the process execution status and issue management commands. In this paper, an operational level process monitor model is developed to bridge the gap between the BPEL model and the process monitoring needs of business users, then tooling and engine extension architecture is recommended on top of a BPEL engine, finally a real customer case study is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this proposed approach. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008.