Visualization

WSO2 BAM provides users with visualization tools to help discover information and knowledge. Once the users discover information, the results can be used for decision support. However, for the right decisions to be made, information discovery needs to happen first.

Visual tools can condense thousands of numbers into one picture. That makes the information more attractive and understandable to users.

Among the visualization tools that come with WSO2 BAM are the dashboards and visual analysis tools. There is also support for generating reports.

Dashboards

Dashboards provide visual displays of important information consolidated and arranged on a single screen, hence information can be digested in a single glance and easily explored. There are multiple dashboards that ship with WSO2 BAM:

The main dashboard consists of Gadgets [TODO: link to gadget server]. The set of predefined gadgets that ship with WSO2 BAM help users to visualize the trends depicted by the monitored server data. These gadgets are organized into multiple tabs, to help users classify and segment selected chunks of information. Users can rearrange the default arrangement, in sync with their monitoring aspirations. Moreover users can define their own gadgets to be included in the dashboard. [TODO: link to how to write a gadget] Hence the main dashboard is highly customizable.

WSO2 BAM has support for operational, tactical and strategic dashboards.

Operational dashboards are to be used by front line workers and supervisors to monitor key operational data that are lightly summarized and updated as and when the latest data is available. For example, latest counts and time measures for both service and mediation data are available as operational dashboards.

Tactical dashboards are to be used by managers and analysts on data that are summarized over hourly, daily and monthly basis.

Strategic dashboards can be used by executives and managers on data that are summarized on monthly or quarterly basis, to monitor the execution of strategic objectives.

Service data and mediation data dashboards are operational level dashboards. Tactical and strategic aspects of dashboards are embedded in the service and mediation analytics dashboards.

Analytics

Analytical decision making is a strategic weapon for companies. Analytics is the science of analysis. WSO2 BAM provides means to analyze the service and mediation data, summarized over time dimensions. Users can dig into information on the request, response, and fault counts as well as average time information for various levels of service invocations and mediation data, to help identify trends in the usage of services and message mediation patterns. These information can be used to help with strategic decision making in both IT and business domains. For example, IT can make use of analytics to help with capacity planning for the SOA infrastructure. Business decision makers can monitor the business trends and decide on what business functions to expand, and what steps to be taken to increase the percentage of successfully closed deals. In other words, business users can fine tune the business processes, based on the knowledge discovered.

The knowledge discovery facilitated by the visualization tools of WSO2 BAM help identify valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable patterns in data that are being collected.

The summarizations in the analytics dashboards are based on time dimensions. Both service data and mediation data are summarized into the following time dimensions:

Based on the above time dimensions, WSO2 BAM summarizes the collected data in the following manner.