Business Flow
Latest Dynatrace
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.
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.
Set up Business Flow
To set up Business Flow,
-
In Dynatrace Hub, select Business Flow and Install.
-
Open Business Flow and select
Business Flow to get to the Configuration page.
Note:
Configuration
is an editable name. You can change it by clicking on the text. -
Select
Description and describe the business flow. For example, you could create a payment process flow called
ACME Payment Process
.
Define your first step
-
In the rightmost side panel, under Step 1, open Add event dropdown menu, and select a business event to specify a step completion or a specific business exception.
Note: You can add up to 5 events for each step.
-
Name the step by clicking on Step 1 name at the top of the side panel.
Define more steps
-
In the main panel tree, hover over Step 1 box, and select
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
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.
- To create a previous step, select
-
Continue adding further steps until your business flow is complete.
Add the correlation ID
-
Set the default correlation ID. Select
Advanced settings to display the Advanced settings window.
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.
-
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. Click the Business exception check box to designate an event as a business exception in a step.
Set the optional business KPI
-
Select
Advanced settings to open the Advanced settings window.
-
Select Mapping event dropdown field and choose the business event that contains the attribute to use to calculate the KPI.
-
Select Mapping attribute from event dropdown field and choose the KPI. Only attributes that are of type
long
ordouble
are shown. -
Close the Advance settings configuration window.
-
Select 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 at the top 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.
You can click on any of the nodes (steps) or metric bubbles (between steps) and explore the details in a side panel.
- Click on a node to view the step’s definition. Click the side panel Explore tab for a list of unique flows that have reached that step. For any of the listed flows, click on the magnifier icon to explore the end-to-end business flow details.
- If the step includes business exceptions, the side panel will include a Business exceptions tab. Use this tab to explore business exceptions in the context of the associated end-to-end business flow.
- Click on a metric bubble between steps to display a list of dropped or inflight flows. 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. Drops between steps are listed as abandoners. Business exceptions are listed as errors. For any step with errors, click on the step to view the associated error business events. Click the Analyze button to view errors over time.
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.
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, click View KPIs over time button. 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. Define the business exception or delay threshold for each failure mode. Define alerts for failures that have a significant business impact.
-
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.