Business Flow

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IT teams and business owners can use Business Flow to monitor and analyze critical business process flows. You can track end-to-end process delays, detect process anomalies, and report business key performance indicators (KPIs). Business Flow helps with diagnosing process issues and prioritizing process optimization opportunities to improve business outcomes.

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Track your business performance indicators and results, detect problematic processes, and prioritize opportunities.

Capabilities

With Business Flow, you can

  • Report business process KPIs, including flows completed (conversions), average flow completion time, business exceptions, and a business KPI of your choice.
  • Visualize and analyze individual process flows from start to finish.
  • Detect and explore uncompleted or dropped process flows to determine the cause, such as an IT error, a business exception, or abnormal inter-step transit time.
  • Visualize process errors and business exceptions at each step.

Prerequisites

required

  • Define and activate business events for each process step.
  • Identify a unique identifier (correlation ID) that is common to all process steps (for example, order_id). The name of the correlation ID may differ between steps; the value is used to connect steps into a single flow.

recommended

  • Identify business events that indicate incidents or business exceptions, such as credit card payment errors, product outages, shipping exceptions, or other non-IT process issues.
  • Identify a business KPI of your choice, such as revenue, that can be extracted from a business event attribute.

Limitations

  • Business processes can include no more than five branches in one step.
  • Each step in a business process can be defined using no more than five different business events.
  • A business process can have up to 20 nodes in total. A node is defined as a step or a branch; if a step has three branches, that counts as 3 nodes.
  • Each step must have at least one active business event assigned, otherwise the configuration cannot be saved.
  • Ensure that the timestamp difference between events at different steps is at least 1 millisecond. Lower resolution durations are not supported and may trigger false positive alerts for disordered flows during process analysis.

Set up Business Flow

To set up Business Flow

  1. In Dynatrace Hub, select Business Flow and Install.

  2. Open Business Flow and select Add Business Flow to get to the Configuration page.

  3. 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 5 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 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 global 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 rightmost panel, find the global 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

Business Flow details

To get to the Business Flow details, select Business Flow name on the left panel of the page. From the list of already created business flow configurations, select the one you want to explore, and you'll be presented with the Business Flow details view of that configuration.

In Business Flow details, you can choose a Tree or Funnel view.

Tree view

The Tree view displays all steps with the corresponding numbers of unique flows at each step. If you have defined business exceptions, the number of exceptions is displayed for each relevant step.

Business Flow Tree view

You can click on any of the nodes (steps) and explore the details in a side panel.

  • Select a node to view the step’s definition in the Definition button. On the side panel, expand the dropdown menu to see a list of completed unique flows that have reached that step. For any of the listed flows, select the icon to explore the end-to-end business flow details.
  • If the step includes business exceptions, the side panel will allow filtering and displaying them.
  • Select drops or inflights in the filter to show inbound drops or inflights to that step. For any of the listed flows, click on the magnifier icon to explore the end-to-end business flow details.

Flow details include timestamps and all attributes associated with each business event on the flow.

Funnel view

The Funnel view displays the business process as a conversion funnel. Business exceptions are listed as errors.

The Funnel view is not active if the flow has branches.

The DQL query that Business Flow executes to retrieve the funnel data can be used to explore the data further using Notebooks and to add the information to a dashboard using Dashboards. Select the Open query icon at the bottom of the funnel and choose Notebooks or Dashboards.

The Business Flow funnel view

Reported KPIs

The Business Flow KPIs visible at the top of both pages provide four key performance indicators, calculated as a change in percent against the previous monitoring timeframe:

  • Business performance indicator (by default, revenue).
  • Fulfillment or conversion of unique flows in the business process.
  • Errors and business exceptions in the monitored flows.
  • Average flow duration (the time from start to end of a business process).

To view KPIs in a timeline, select any KPI. Each of the four KPIs is graphed according to the timeframe selector.

Business process monitoring

Business processes are the automation backbone of modern businesses, and they must operate efficiently to meet business goals. Most of those processes can impact customer experience, either positively or negatively. Most organizations rely on hundreds, if not thousands, of business processes, from procurement to order fulfillment. These processes depend on your IT systems to achieve their goals efficiently and at scale. Business Flow makes it easier than ever to monitor complex business processes

Best practices

Consider the following to help you get started.

  • Choose a business process that has a clear impact on a business outcome. Ideally, there will be a measurable business KPI to help you track performance.

  • Choose a problematic business process that creates ongoing friction between business and IT teams, exposing collaboration deficiencies.

  • Business Flow uses a common identifier or correlation ID (for example, order_id) to connect process steps into end-to-end flows. Most process steps should already include this information; if not, you can skip the step or ask your development team to add a correlation ID.

  • Gain agreement from stakeholders as you define monitoring goals. What is the role of the process? Why is it important? How is success measured? What defines failure?

  • Document the current state of the business process. Start by identifying key process milestones, then break down these milestone steps into smaller intermediate steps.

  • Manage the scope of monitoring by abstracting smaller steps where appropriate. Abstracted steps can always be added later but should not unnecessarily delay implementation.

  • Identify the KPI or KPIs used to measure process health.

  • Understand the relative severity of different failure modes.

  • Determine the source of the business events for each process step and for each business exception you want to track. Possible sources include OneAgent, RUM sessions, log entries, or external business systems through an API. Where possible, choose OneAgent as the source to simplify access to business data without requiring development effort. Configure and test the business events.

  • Configure the business process in Business Flow.

  • Compare the actual process with the documented current state.

  • Improve the stability of the business process,

    • Focus first on outliers and anomalies. What causes them? How can they be reduced or eliminated?

    • If process performance is inconsistent, identify and address the causes where possible.

    • Consider automation to remediate common anomalies, failure conditions, or delays.

  • Plan for ongoing optimization. Once process performance is reasonably consistent and predictable, work with stakeholders to look for opportunities to improve process efficiency.

Terminology

Term

Description

Business exception

A business exception is an abnormal or undesired result from a business transaction or function. Business exceptions are defined by the application and sent to Dynatrace as parameters of business events.

Business flow

Business flow is a synonym for business process.

Correlation ID

A correlation ID is a unique identifier used to group individual step executions into a unique end-to-end process. The correlation ID must be present in each step.

Drop

A drop is an incomplete business process that fails to reach the next step due to an IT error, a business exception, or an above-average delay. It is also referred to as dropped flow.

Inflight flow

An inflight flow refers to a unique business process flow that is in progress at a given step. It remains inflight unless it exceeds the average delay for that step, at which point it is considered a dropped flow (drop).

Process branch

A process branch is an optional path in a business process. The process step immediately preceeding the branch defines the condition that determines which branch is taken.

Process loop

A process loop is a repeated step in a business process.

Process milestone

Process milestones are major process steps, often used to segment or abstract complex business processes by masking or ignoring smaller intermediate steps.

Process step

Process steps are tasks or transactions performed by systems or people as part of a complete business process.

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