Business Observability Feature Overview

Business Observability organizes systems, services, interfaces, and technical components along critical business paths. It brings metrics, alerts, logs, and traces into one business view so you can assess health, follow dependencies to anomalous nodes, and verify recovery.

Value

User task	Information provided	Result
Routine monitoring	Business trace status, key metrics, and ongoing alerts	Identify the business trace that needs attention first.
Anomaly isolation	Topology, anomalous nodes, and upstream or downstream dependencies	Determine where the anomaly occurred and what may be affected.
Cause analysis	Metrics, interfaces, alerts, logs, and traces associated with a node	Correlate observability data to validate the cause.
Recovery verification	Alert state, node state, and metric trends	Confirm whether the business recovered after the fix.

Use cases

• Monitor a critical transaction, service flow, or system dependency from a business perspective.
• Investigate changes in error rate, response time, throughput, or resource state along the business path.
• Assess how an anomaly affects upstream and downstream systems, services, or instances.
• Verify recovery with the same business metrics and alerts used to detect the issue.

How it works

1. Ingest hosts, processes, services, metrics, alerts, logs, and traces through an Agent or Data Integration.
2. Organize systems, services, interfaces, technical components, application components, or third-party entities into a business trace.
3. Define health with an entry node, interface scope, key metrics, and alert rules.
4. Monitor trace cards and details, then drill down from anomalous nodes.
5. After a fix, continue observing alerts, node health, and metric trends to verify recovery.

Main features

Feature	Purpose
Business trace orchestration	Add business nodes, connect dependencies, and define interfaces and an entry node when needed.
Health monitoring	Identify unhealthy business flows from trace cards, key metrics, and alert states.
Node investigation	Open metrics, interfaces, alerts, logs, traces, and call relationships associated with a node.
Vertical architecture	Continue from a business node to related hosts, processes, and service instances.
External synchronization	Import business traces, nodes, edges, and drill-down relationships maintained by a third-party system.

Business traces and request traces

	Business trace	Request trace
Represents	Systems, services, and components organized around a business outcome	The actual service calls for one request
Stability	Relatively stable business architecture	Generated dynamically for each request
Primary use	Monitor business health, assess impact, and organize investigation entry points	Analyze latency and errors for a specific request

A business trace does not replace request tracing. It provides the business architecture view and lets you open request traces when request-level evidence is needed.

For your first implementation, follow the Business Observability Implementation Steps. After implementation, apply the Best Practices for ongoing improvement.