Oracle BPEL system is not a single server but instead an ecosystem of various servers. The BPEL ecosystem is considered to be down if any of its constituent elements are down. Hence monitoring the Oracle BPEL environment means monitoring each of the below entities:

BPEL Processes and Partner Links

Monitoring the health of BPEL processes is critical to meeting service-level agreements for your processes. You can probably ensure availability and meet service-level requirements by ensuring performance and functioning of the partner links your BPEL processes depend on and identifying problems in a proactive manner. The best approach is to automate tests to be performed at regular intervals and warn the admins when a particular partner link has an unscheduled service shutdown or a longer-than-expected response time.

BPEL Engine

The health of the BPEL engine is critical for your applications. Besides the status of the BPEL engine, you should also focus on statistics such as memory; CPU consumed; and business metrics such as open and closed instances, synchronous and asynchronous process latency, and load factors.

Dehydration Store

The BPEL engine stores process data in the dehydration store (typically a relational database). If you want high availability for your dehydration store, you will probably use a clustered database. Your database administrators should make sure that the database is available and performing properly.

Authentication Server

This is the server against which all your service access is authenticated. If the authentication server is down, none of your services will be usable. Hence, it is important that the authentication server is setup in a high-availability mode as well.

The Application Server on which the BPEL server is running

A typical BPEL engine runs in an application server environment. For example, Oracle BPEL Process Manager can be deployed on a J2EE-compliant application server such as Oracle Application Server, Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, or JBoss Application Server. The BPEL engine may depend on several resources and services provided by the application server, such as JDBC DataSource, JMS providers, JCA connectors, and shared libraries. The health of the application server, along with the performance of these resources, may directly influence the performance of your BPEL engine. Each application server provides several health indicator metrics. You should automate a mechanism that would proactively issue an alert before anything goes wrong with your application server.

All the activities described above can be summarized as a set of best practices followed to ensure the availability of your BPEL infrastructure:

• Establish service-level objectives for your BPEL processes and partner links.
• Keep a library of BPEL suitcases in your software library. It will help in rebuilding a system in case of server failure.
• Automate routine operations such as purging old process instances.
• Monitor the performance of partner links.
• Monitor the whole BPEL ecosystem, not just the BPEL engine.
• Keep track of BPEL ecosystem membership/topology changes.
• Keep a gold image of your configuration when everything is stable and keep updating it after every configuration change. This will help you find the cause of any possible problem due to configuration changes.
• Monitor BPEL server-specific J2EE artifacts such as the JMS queues and data sources used by the BPEL server in addition to J2EE constructs used by BPEL processes.
• Make sure that you select a management solution that can maximize your productivity and help you deliver maximum service through automation.

JBoss jBPM is a JBoss Enterprise Framework that delivers workflow, business process management (BPM), and process orchestration in a scalable and flexible product footprint. JBoss jBPM reduces development time to automate and integrate business processes leveraging IT. It provides the tools and process execution engine to integrate services deployed in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and automate workflows in Java and Web applications to reduce business process error, speed process execution, and enhance business performance.

JBoss jBPM enables IT flexibility by supporting multiple-process languages with the same scalable process engine platform. It’s pluggable architecture is extensible and customizable on every level: within the process engine, for each process definition, and every corresponding process instance. It seamlessly integrates with JBoss Seam which is an application framework for simplifying and unifying the EJB and Java Server Faces (JSF) component models. JBoss jBPM provides a process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of both Java and declarative programming techniques.

Intalio is an open source business process platform built around the standards-based Eclipse STP BPMN modeler and Apache ODE BPEL engine, both originally contributed by Intalio. Intalio Enterprise provides all the components required for the design, deployment, and management of the most complex business processes which includes

• BRE
• BAM
• Porta
• ESB
• ECM

Intalio is available in several editions but what we’re most interested in is Intalio’s free community edition. This edition is made of two components, Intalio Designer and Intalio Server. Intalio Designer allows one to model  the business level processes for the model to be eventually deployed to Intalio Server. Intalio Designer is the only tool currently available on the market that allows any BPMN model to be turned into fully executable BPEL processes without having to write any code. Intalio Server is a high-performance process engine that can support the most complex business processes, deployed within mission-critical environments.

ProcessMaker is an open source business process management (BPM) and workflow software designed for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). It is a user friendly solution to manage workflow effectively and efficiently. Business users and process experts with no programming experience can design and run workflows, increase transparency, and radically reduce paperwork, automate processes across systems, including human resources, finance, and operations.

With ProcessMaker you can easily create workflow maps, design custom forms, extract data from external data sources and many more key features to optimize workflow management and business operations.

One key advantage of ProcessMaker is the online library which provides many process templates for you to download and begin editing. Learning curve can also be reduced since you’re starting from one which is already readily built and tested.

CuteFlow is a web-based open source document circulation and workflow system. Users are able to define “documents” which are send step by step to every station/user in a list.
It’s an electronic way for doing (i.e. internal) document circulations. A document can be assembled from input fields of different types. The fields can be filled with values by the receiver of the document directly in the users E-Mail-Client. After a completed circulation you will have a completely filled document. Also attachments to the document are possible (i.e. for illustration material). All operations like starting a workflow, tracking, workflow-definition or status observation can be done within a comfortable and easy to use web interface.

ActiveVOS is a standards-based visual orchestration system. ActiveVOS revolutionizes the work of automating business processes by making it easier than ever before to create BPM applications that radically improve business results. ActiveVOS also overcomes the cost barrier that has until now delayed many organizations’ BPM efforts.

ActiveVOS system consists of the ActiveVOS Designer and the ActiveVOS Server. ActiveVOS Designer is a rich productivity tool that incorporates the BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People open standards and a set of advanced wizards that make easy it to create business process models and orchestrations quickly. ActiveVOS Server easily scales to meet the needs of enterprises of any size and can be rapidly incorporated into a production J2EE execution environment to meet rigorous performance and availability requirements. With ActiveVOS Server, teams can leverage existing skills and collaborate to develop, deploy and run production business process management applications.

“A standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) will provide businesses with the capability of understanding their internal business procedures in a graphical notation and will give organizations the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner. Furthermore, the graphical notation will facilitate the understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between the organizations. This will ensure that businesses will understand themselves and participants in their business and will enable organizations to adjust to new internal and B2B business circumstances quickly.” BPMN Charter.

Activities

An activity is a unit of work performed within a business process. An activity can be classified as atomic (Task) or compound (Sub-Process).

Events

An event is some condition that occurs during the course of a business process. Events are further classified into Start Events, Intermediate Events, and End Events.

• Start Events indicate where a process will begin.
  

  Start Events

   

• Intermediate Events occur anytime during the execution of the process (i.e. after the start of the process and before the end of the process).
  

  Intermediate Events

   

• End Events symbolize the end of the process
  

  End Events

Gateways

Gateways are elements that control the flow of the business process. They are further classified as:

Data-based Exclusive Gateway: When splitting, it routes the incoming sequence flow to exactly one of the outgoing branches based on the condition evaluation. While merging, it waits for one incoming branch before triggering the outgoing flow.

Event-based Exclusive Gateway: It represents a branching point in the process where the outgoing alternatives are based on the events that occur at that point in the process (as opposed to the condition evaluation).

Inclusive Gateway: When splitting, one or more branches are activated based on branching condition. While merging it waits for all active incoming branches to complete.

Parallel Gateway: When splitting, all outgoing branches are activated simultaneously. While merging, it waits for all incoming branches before triggering the outgoing flow.

Complex Gateway: It triggers one or more branches based on some complex, descriptive, or subjective logic.  It is used in cases where the other gateways cannot satisfy the requirements.

Swimlanes

The concept of swimlanes is used to partition organizations and responsibilities. Swimlanes consists of Pools and Lanes. Pools represent a high level organization of process objects. For xample, depending the business process, a pool can represent a company, department, or a regional office. A lane represents sub-partitions for objects within the pool. For example, it a company is represented as a pool, various functions within a company can be represented as lanes.

Artifacts

Artifacts provide the capability to depict information that cannot be captured by the basic flow-chart structure of the process. There are three standard artifacts in BPMN.

Text Annotation: It denotes some descriptive documentation for the BPMN object. 

Data Object: It represents data flowing through the process. For example document, email, file, etc. 

Group: It represents a logical grouping of elements. 

Connectors

 There are three types of connectors that can be used in BPMN.

Sequence Flow: It defines the execution order of activities.

Message Flow: It symbolizes information flow across organizational boundaries.

Association: It indicates flow of data from one activity to another.

This article gives the most basic introduction to BPMN to get you started in the right direction. You can start modeling a majority of simple processes by using the material presented here. However, for complex processes you will need to make use of the more advanced concepts of BPM like Exceptional Handling, Transactions and Compensation, Looping, Ad Hoc Processes, Orchestration, and Process Choreography.  For further reading, some good introductory articles can be found on official BPMN website.