Set up Business Flow

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  • How-to guide
  • 3-min read

To set up Business Flow Business Flow

  1. Open Business Flow Business Flow and select Add Business Flow to get to the configuration page.

  2. Select the icon and rename the Configuration. In the same place, you can also describe the business flow. For example, you can create a payment process flow called ACME Payment Process.

Define your first step

  1. In the rightmost side panel, under Step 1, select Add Add event dropdown under Events, and choose a business event to specify a step completion.

    Note: You can add up to five events for each step.

  2. Name the step by selecting Step 1 name in the side panel.

Define more steps

  1. In the main panel tree, hover over Step 1 box, and select Add tab at the bottom of the step box to add the next step.

    Note: You can also add previous steps and generate a branch.

    • To create a previous step, select Add tab at the top of the Step 1 box.
    • To generate a branch, select at the bottom of the Step 1 box. If there is (at least) one step after the Step 1, you can create a (new) branch.
    • To define a step as a loop (a step that can happen several times), select on the right side of the Step 1 box.
    • To bypass steps or branches, you can connect a step to another step that is ahead by two, or more steps in the business flow.

    Note: That steps cannot be reordered.

  2. Continue adding further steps until your business flow is complete.

Add the correlation ID

  1. In the rightmost side panel, set the default correlation ID in the app settings .

    Note: The default correlation ID entered here is applied to all steps. Optional local correlation IDs override the default setting and can be defined for each relevant step.

  2. The Correlation ID field is pre-filled with the default correlation ID. If an event associated with this step uses a different correlation ID, enter the new name in the Correlation ID field located in the detail view of the selected step (the rightmost side panel).

Add business exceptions

Some events can indicate a business exception; for example, an out-of-stock event. Select the events that are designated as Business exception in a step.

Set the optional business KPI

  1. In the rightmost panel, find the app settings .

  2. Select Mapping event dropdown field and choose the business event that contains the attribute to use to calculate the KPI.

  3. Select Mapping attribute from event dropdown field and choose the KPI. Only attributes that are of type long or double are shown.

  4. Close the Advance settings configuration window.

  5. Select Validate & Save configuration.

Example of steps with correlation IDs (global and local) and business KPI

Step name

Correlation ID

Business KPI

Place order

order_id

Order confirmed

order_id

order_amount

Order shipped

order_id

Order delivered

order_number

Set a business flow configuration as an entity

A business flow configuration can be ingested in Smartscape on Grail as a new entity that ties critical business processes with your IT entities as hosts or process group instances.

Having a business flow as an entity allows Problems app - new Problems to find relationships between an IT-detected problem with any of the critical business processes that Business Flow Business Flow is monitoring. In addition, Problems app - new Problems displays which business processes are impacted by the problem, allowing drill down into Business Flow Business Flow in problems investigation mode.

  1. Set up a business flow as an entity.
  2. Define the priority level of the business process (low, medium, high, or critical).

A business flow as entity can be seen in Notebooks exploring Smartscape nodes with the type BIZ_FLOW

SmartscapeNodes BIZ_FLOW
| fields id, type, name

With a result like follows

id

type

name

BIZ_FLOW-000000001CD85158

BIZ_FLOW

Purchase order

BIZ_FLOW-FFFFFFFFF4557E37

BIZ_FLOW

Employee onboarding

Recommendations

To fully leverage the capabilities provided when a business flow is defined as an entity, configure at least a two‑step business flow with a correlation ID. This improves traceability across steps and ensures more accurate mapping to topology entities.

Optionally, define business KPIs to enhance observability and provide greater insight into business performance. We also recommend verifying that the business events defined in each step include topological entities, which improves Smartscape connectivity and enables more accurate impact analysis.

Monitoring KPIs

When a business flow is defined as an entity, Dynatrace automatically enables basic KPI monitoring through a backend scheduled job. This job generates standardized business events that follow the Semantic Dictionary guidelines for Business Flow KPI events.

Both the generation frequency and evaluation timeframe for these KPIs are user-configurable. We recommend setting the evaluation timeframe to at least three to four times the average duration of the monitored business process. This ensures accurate KPI evaluation and avoids missing data windows for long‑running processes.

Generated data is stored in Grail with a default retention period of 35 days. You can adjust this retention time by creating a custom bucket based on the event.types defined in the Dynatrace Semantic Dictionary.

Related tags
Business FlowBusiness FlowBusiness Observability