As one of the most widely used enterprise integration solutions, IBM IntegrationBus (IIB—formerly known as WebSphere Message Broker) allows easy connections between different kinds of enterprise applications and services. As it’s usually used to integrate different types of services, it’s important to have visibility into how the connections between these services perform. Especially when something goes wrong in such a complex system, it can be difficult to identify the root cause of the problem—is the issue an erroneous service, or a design error in the message flow between services? It’s important to have a unified perspective over all parts of the systems to be able to make the right decisions.

We use the built-in monitoring feature to transmit messages about a successful or erroneous run of the integration flow.

A message flow publishes an event when something interesting happens. This event is a message that contains information about the source of the event, the time of the event, and the reason for the event. The event can include more details from the message body or from the integration flow context. A successful status message would provide details on the source and target system or application and identifiers for the data that was transmitted. These fields can be used to correlate messages that belong to the same transaction, or to convey business data to a monitoring application. In the case of an error, the message would include the error details.

The monitoring event is published to a topic each time a business message passes through a flow node terminal (like the output terminal).

By using the publish-subscribe mechanism, the business flow is decoupled from the monitoring platform and don’t affect each other’s performance.

To consume the monitoring events, we recommend using the ELK stack or a business analytics app like PowerBI.