Rules created in BPM Events interact with BP Server, the Business Process Server’s business process engine, to:
Capture events generated by the execution of the processes.
Control the execution of these processes.
These rules enable users to:
Monitor a business process. An advantage in using BPM Events rules is its ability to recognize the business context in which a process executes and to monitor business processes along with their resources. Indeed, monitoring a business process—more than simply monitoring a server load or resource usage—provides powerful support for managing online business processes.
Correlate monitoring sources. Rules also add value by correlating a wide range of monitoring sources. Monitoring of processes (volume, requests, response time, turn-around time) and of their contexts also requires an understanding of how these processes use the IT resources they consume (servers, networks, databases, equipment), as well as how they involve people and their skills.
Generate/Analyze reports. BPM Events rules, as part of their monitoring function, also generate business metrics that are exported as real-time reports, while other rules analyze these metrics and automatically generate alarms or make decisions.
Enforce business policies. BPM Events rules can also be created that represent business management functions, whether these functions are associated with an application or not. Because of the decoupling between rules and processes, it is possible to enforce policies that are not tied to a particular application, but that manage resources and objects across business processes (or shared by several processes). Such business policies concern people involved in these applications, the assignment of various shared resources, the timing and scheduling of tasks, policies that relate to a class of customers or trading partners, and related message exchanges (regardless of the processes with which they may be involved).
Dynamically modify rules. Finally, BPM Events rules that express business policies governing the business process can be easily and dynamically changed because they are not tied to the process definition.
For these reasons, rules are represented separately from business processes in Business Process Server and run by a distinct rule engine. However, they may be associated with these processes under the general umbrella of an "Business Process Server application," which defines the package of all objects and other elements required to publish and run a business application as a unit.
Capture events generated by the execution of the processes.