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Co-authored by: Elisabeth Vehling & Kyle Blauer

With the growing complexity of the business-IT sector, quickly finding relevant business data for your team's needs can be an increasing challenge. IBM Instana® business activity monitoring (IBAM) Business perspectives provides a simple yet powerful way to segment views of your IT systems by business context and role-based access control.

Business process management (BPM) tools play a pivotal role in aiding enterprises to model and run their business processes. IBAM aims to seamlessly discover business process flows running on your IT systems, extract relevant business context, and assist site reliability engineers (SREs) or business personas with issue prioritization based on business impact. For more, see The business-IT connection: Real-time insights with Instana Observability.

Core features of business perspectives

A business perspective is a configurable group of business processes defined by a set of tag filters and access permissions allowing you to highlight what is most relevant to a team or individual user. Core features include:

• Separate list of processes and perspectives

• The business monitoring page now has a Perspectives tab that displays a table of business perspectives you have access to. The table containing all business processes is now located under the Processes tab on the same page.

• Get health data for a perspective

• Rows in the business perspectives table display a description, number of processes, and the maximum health severity. Clicking on the health icon displays a navigable list of IT Issues impacting the processes in the perspective. Using this information, you can quickly compare the health of multiple business perspectives and see all impacting issues in one place.

• Define perspectives using IT variables

• Filter business processes using supported Instana tag filters including but not limited to process host, cluster, and service. For more, see Filtering in Instana.

• Role-based access control (RBAC)

• Configure RBAC for each business perspective to limit access to the business perspectives users can view. Users will now only be able to see business processes included in their access level. For more, see Access Control in Instana.

Creating business perspectives, step by step

To create a business perspective, navigate to the Business Monitoring page in the left side navigation menu.

The Business Monitoring page defaults to the Perspectives tab that displays a table of all of your accessible business perspectives. Click on the Create perspective button at the top right of the table to open the business perspective creation wizard which has two steps.

In step one, you can add tag filter expression(s) to filter the business processes you want to include as part of your business perspective. As you modify the filters, the right side of the wizard will update with a list of matching business processes, so feel free to experiment. Once you're happy with your perspective's filters, click the Next button at the bottom of the wizard.

In step two, you can name your perspective and provide a short description if desired. Click Create to save the new business perspective. If successful, you'll be automatically taken to the new perspective's detail page.

Business perspectives in action: An SRE use case

Stan the SRE is responsible for maintaining the IT infrastructure that supports their company's business applications. Stan has test, preproduction, and production environments set up that are all monitored by Instana. Changes to the company's applications are first deployed to the test environment, then progress to pre-production before finally being deployed to the production environment. Each environment is primarily used by a different team for their unique needs--for example, the test environment is mainly used by developers to initially test out their code changes.

Stan has to ensure that teams only have access to the environment they need, and not have access to other environments. Each team needs to understand how their changes or introduced bugs impact the application from a business perspective.

Let's walk through how Stan sets up IBAM business perspectives so that teams can monitor the health of business processes in their respective environments.

First, Stan sets up a new business perspective called Test perspective that includes all business processes running on hosts in the test environment. In the RBAC settings for the perspective, Stan creates a Developer group and adds the relevant users from the development team. Stan then grants the Developer group view access to the Test perspective.

Next, Stan creates another business perspective for a specific region in their production environment that supports a high-priority customer. Stan adds filters for the host machine names as well as a filter for the cluster name of the region. Stan restricts access to this perspective to the SRE team.

Stan and the other teams can now use these business perspectives to quickly check on the health of business processes in each environment. The Developer group can quickly see the business effects of their code changes on the business application. This allows them to quickly identify any potential issues while still protecting user privacy.

IBAM business perspectives with role-based access control enables your teams to view relevant business process data while protecting user privacy. To learn more about Instana Business Activity monitoring and test out business perspectives and other features, visit the Instana product page.