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Difference between monitoring and reporting |
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Written by Chintan Rajyaguru
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Tuesday, 19 May 2009 16:39 |
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About a year ago, I wrote about how
to think about a monitoring solution in the SOA/BPM world . The focus
was on the holistic thought process for an enterprise wide monitoring
strategy. My experience at the time was (and still is) that IT often
doesn't understand the difference between reporting and monitoring. A
monitoring solution often gets picked just because it sounds like a cool
new technology (not to mention it makes the resume attractive) and
business likes to idea of having pretty looking dials, charts and graphs.
Monitoring and reporting are two different concepts. A business solution
may utilize both to satisfy the business requirements. Keep in mind the
following differences between them when picking one versus the other:
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Reporting is a data driven solution, which shows information about the
business. This makes the report a snapshot of some business
information at a given point in time. On the other hand, a monitoring
solution is an event based solution, which shows what is happening
during business execution. This makes monitoring solution a 'view'
into the business. The view is not a time based snapshot. It tells you
what is happening now
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A report largely shows historical data. It's the information after the
fact whereas a monitoring solution can show current information,
historical information and even trends
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A report tends to be static. There are solutions where business users
can generate ad-hoc reports. However, these ad-hoc reports merely
given enhanced filtering or query capabilities on the business data.
Monitoring, on the other hand, is much more dynamic. It allows insight
into the business from different perspectives. Depending on the
solution used, it can even allow the business to reshuffle things and
dynamically change business process to respond to the monitored
events. For example, a monitoring solution can keep an eye on the
number of claims arriving in a particular processing center. If the
number goes beyond certain threshold the business can route new claims
to a different processing center on the fly
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The only source of information for reports is database. In case of
monitoring, the information being monitored does come from the
database from technical perspective but the source of that information
could be an event generated by anything: a business object, a system,
an application or even an entity external to the organization
Now that we know the difference between reporting and monitoring, next
time we will look at an example requirement and decide whether reporting
or monitoring makes the most sense.
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