Monitoring Business Processes with Queries

Many enterprises nowadays use business processes, based on the BPEL standard, to achieve their goals. These are complex, often distributed, processes. Monitoring the execution of such processes for interesting patterns is critical for enforcing business policies and meeting efficiency and reliability goals. BP-Mon (Business Processes Monitoring) is a novel query language for monitoring business processes, that allows users to visually define monitoring tasks and associated reports, using a simple intuitive interface, similar to those used for designing BPEL processes. We describe here the BP-Mon language and its underlying formal model. We also present the language implementation and describe our novel optimization techniques. An important feature of the implementation is that BP-Mon queries are translated to BPEL processes that run on the same execution engine as the monitored processes. Our experiments indicate that this approach incurs very minimal overhead, hence is a practical and efficient approach to monitoring.