In every company, there are processes that are critical to business success, whether it’s the purchasing process in an online shop, product manufacturing, or billing workflows. For all these business-critical processes, a failure of the entire process or of one or more individual steps can directly impact the company’s success.
These business processes have become increasingly complex, involving a wide variety of IT systems to fully support them. Not all these systems are under the control of the internal IT department. Often, specific systems and functions are provided by other departments or external vendors. Additionally, the number of involved technologies continues to grow. As a result, the IT landscape that supports business functionality has reached a level of complexity that is difficult, if not impossible, to fully grasp.
Despite this, IT departments must ensure the performance of these core processes to drive business success. Failures in business-critical processes, such as assembly line production, must be prevented or minimized. Early warnings about resource shortages and automatic root-cause analysis are essential to reduce the Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) and the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
Together with our clients, we pursue customized strategies to improve observability and thus enhance the quality of business processes. Below, we present some of these approaches.
Umbrella Monitoring
Large enterprise IT landscapes are typically very complex: off-the-shelf applications meet in-house developments; legacy applications coexist with modern microservices. Therefore, a solution is needed that provides observability for all software applications supporting the business process.
In workshops with stakeholders from various departments, we analyze our customers’ business processes. We identify:
- Which functions are critical to business success
- The impact of specific system outages on the business process
- Interfaces to other systems
- Whether monitoring already exists for the relevant system
With this information, we collaborate with the IT department to develop a target architecture that integrates existing monitoring and closes any gaps. Depending on the modernity of the technologies used in the involved applications, we select advanced observability solutions such as Dynatrace, or we leverage dashboarding tools like Grafana, Splunk, etc., to consolidate data from different sources. We always consider existing tools and expand or integrate them sensibly.
All-in-One Observability
Especially when parts of a process are already built on modern microservice or multi-cloud architectures, it makes sense to use an observability platform from the outset that offers transaction-based end-to-end visibility into the business process. This allows for precise root-cause analysis even in complex environments. Third-party calls, for example, credit card validation during checkout, can also be monitored, and issues flagged early.
For this approach to succeed, all involved systems must be seamlessly monitored with the chosen observability solution. Data from external systems, such as specialized monitoring tools, should be integrated only to enrich data and support root-cause analysis. Interruptions in monitoring the transaction chain must be avoided at all costs, as this would prevent complete root-cause visibility and undermine trust in the observability solution.
To achieve consistent, transaction-based monitoring, we rely on observability platforms like Dynatrace, enriched with information from tools such as Prometheus or other base-level monitoring solutions.
Implementation Examples
The success of these approaches speaks for itself.
For instance, we helped a large retail company implement an umbrella monitoring solution for their logistics process. All monitoring data from infrastructure components and relevant applications involved in the process was integrated into Splunk, enabling true end-to-end visibility of the business process.
This approach delivered comprehensive insights into process availability and performance with minimal effort in a short time. Additionally, it allowed for more meaningful alerting -not just infrastructure-related alerts, but also alerts tied directly to business processes.
In a second example, we worked with a logistics company to unify various monitoring systems and implement transaction-based monitoring, aggregating data in Dynatrace. This brought transparency to their quotation process, allowing them to identify and resolve issues quickly. This approach can now be extended to other business-critical processes.
In a third case, for a B2C company, we implemented Dynatrace as an all-in-one observability solution for their webshop. This ensured the availability and performance of the booking process for new contracts, especially during peak times. Transaction-based monitoring helped improve user satisfaction.
Are You Ready to Take Your Business-Critical Processes to the Next Level?
Contact us today to learn more about tailored business process monitoring solutions. Together, we’ll find the optimal strategy to make your processes more efficient, transparent, and resilient. Let’s lay the foundation for your future business success!
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