To measure latency of a business object, we need to group data from the probes that are positioned along the route of the object as it moves through the network or application. We do this by defining Flows.

Flow

A Flow is the journey of a business object type, such as an order or trade, through the monitored system.

We define each Flow as a series of Agent points, each of which are fed by probes capturing and decoding events that relate to that business object. Each type of business object has its own distinct Flow. Multiple, distinct business Flows are supported within a single Beeks Analytics instance.

Data capture in Flows

Each Agent is configured with a mapping between the data it receives from probes and the Attributes that exist for that Flow, which enables the Agent to populate the Attributes. It’s necessary to configure a mapping for each individual Agent because different locations in applications or on the network may each represent a business object differently. This mapping is done using VEX language (VMX Expression Language).

VEX supports simple but also rich correlation strategies. For example, with VEX you can:

  • Extract a substring from a business attribute

  • Concatenate multiple attributes

  • Add date components to correlation and alternative ids to ensure uniqueness over time

  • Optimise property extraction for a given class of business data

  • Populate capture attributes conditionally; for example, only assign the order id if the type of the order

    is NEW.