Integration Insight brings a unique take on Integration Monitoring. The Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) has monitoring and audit capabilities out of the box, but those typically focus on the individual Integration/Transaction.
What Insight brings is an overview of the End to End process, something more related to the business process and not the individual Integration transaction.
“Integration Insight in Oracle Integration provides a business-friendly experience, allowing users to model, collect, and monitor metrics for their business processes.“
This post will show how to create and enable Insight within OIC. A Big Thanks to the OIC PM Team as this post is based on a training delivered by them!
We were provided with the Integrations that simulate the E2E process – below is the main Integration that manages Orders, Payments and Shipment.
Without going into much detail, the important part is that we have the below Integration points.
- CheckCredit
- SubmitPayment
- Decline Payment
- Ship Product
- Return Product
Business Analyst Creates a Model
First thing we need to do is Create Model.
This part falls under the business analyst domain. whose task is to create the insight model with milestones, identifier and indicators (measures and dimensions).
“An Integration Insight model provides a grammar for describing the milestones of a business process that are key for tracking business performance.”
In the Name & Description we give Order as the label that will identify multiple instances of the model.
Initial and End Milestones
By default we have an Initial and an End Milestone – which are the points that indicate the beginning and end of the process. This E2E process is started when the order is received, either through a website, a file, or another source.
The Order Received milestone will be mapped to this point in the implementation and is defined as initial.
In the same fashion we define the End (complete) milestone as seen below.
We defined 3 additional Milestones inbetween.
- Decline Payment with Milestone Type: Error
- Ship Order with Milestone Type: Standard
- Return Order with Milestone Type: Terminal/Error
Create Unique Identifier
Every model has to have a unique identifier.
Every Integration Insight model must have a unique instance identifier defined. This identifier describes a value that is extracted at runtime for every instance of the business process defined by the model.
Add Dimensions & Measures
Measures identify values, which allow the state of the application to be quantified.
Dimensions provide a type of grouping and categorization of applications, allowing for “slicing and dicing” of aggregate measures.
For this exercise we have 3 different Dimensions….
Dimension 1
- Name: Shipping State
- Description: US state to which the order has been shipped
- Filterable: Check (this means that dashboards can be filtered by the value of this dimension)
- Milestone: Order Received
- Select a data type: String
Dimension 2
- Name: Return Reason
- Description: Reason why an order was returned
- Filterable: Check
- Milestone: Return Order
- Select a data type: String
Dimension 3
- Name: Model
- Description: Model of the product
- Filterable: leave unchecked
- Milestone: Order Received
- Select a data type: String
….and 2 Measures.
- Name: Number of Items
- Type: Measure
- Description: Total number of items in order
- Filterable: leave unchecked
- Milestone: Order Received
- Select a data type: Integer
- Name: Total Order Amount
- Description: Total price of order
- Filterable: Check
- Milestone: Order Received
- Select a data type: Integer
And finally this is how the Model Outline looks now!
Integration Architect – Map Milestones to Implementation
Now its time for the Integration Architect/ Developer to map the previously created milestones to the respective Integration flow.
In the newly created model select one of the milestones and click on “Map to Integration”.
This will bring to the Integration screen where every Integration has the option Map to Insight. Once we filter for the proper Integration Flow (as mentioned before, this was provided as part of the training exercise)
Choose the respective Model. In this case only one is available.
And the real mapping starts here. Choose the Milestone on the left side and the respective Trigger/Invoke on the right side (left-click and press the add button)
Do this for all Milestones.
Once that is done we should see the green icon for all Milestones.
Integration Architect – Define Extraction Criteria
“After the milestones have been mapped to the integration, the next step is to define extraction criteria for the indicators. This defines how to extract data from the integration variables available at the point when the respective milestone has been mapped. This can be a simple expression, or a more complicated expression.“
First we define the attribute mapping for the Unique Identifier (simply put, it will be the OrderId)
Now press the Define extraction criteria link.
This will allow to Map the OrderId to the Identifier Order Number.
We do the same exercise for all the dimensions and measures.
The mapping here is straight forward – Model to Model, ReturnReason to ReturnReason etc.
At this point we have everything configured and should be able to activate the model!
Activate the Model
With all milestones mapped and indicators defined, the model can now be activated. Navigate back to the Insight model list and look for the Order Process model you defined. Hover over the model and click the activate button.
Wait for some minutes as the activation can take some time!
Now we have an activated model, but there is no captured data yet.
Test & start collecting metrics
We can use the embeded Test functionality to trigger some requests.
We have been provided with a script to automatically (using cUrl) send hundreds of requests.
Business Owner – View and Analyze Data
We need good amount of data to be seeded in the model before we can explore the power of Insight.
Lets look at the console – it gives immediately an view of the transaction status (with the color scheme on the right side)
Out of the box we have the following Dashboards! It shows the E2E process with all the milestones, but even better than that, it allows to drill down. For example, when I press the Return Order milestone (from Milestones Summary Dashboard)…
….It opens a page with all the details giving the business an overview of the returned orders. This is really powerful when comparing to the standard transactional integration monitoring.
You can also have a timeline view of the whole process. Not relevant for this case as the request are all synchronous, but it can add value for those long lived processes.
From a business standpoint there are several ways of visualizing the current status of the process and following/tracking any important milestone along its way.
Custom Dashboard
If the out of the box dashboards are not enough, the users can create custom dashboards, choosing the dimensions/measures and type of display. Sample example below.
Conclusion
Having worked with several Integration solutions, I must say that this capability really stands out as it brings the Business closer to an area traditionally IT focused. Moving from an individual Integration monitoring approach into a full end to End approach gives the business an overview which they understand and can work with. All the related benefits with tracking, alerts, etc, results in a proactive approach into the E2E process. On top of that, all of these dashboards can be embedded into other applications or website (to cover in another post)
Documentation and Other useful Links
The documentation is quite good for this topic.
This video has a great overview of Insight.