Such enterprise software applications are often automated and can be viewed in many ways like a factory or manufacturing facility. For example, a series of applications runs in the background collecting orders from customers logged into a web site, processes and fulfills those orders, and issues invoices, with little or no human intervention.

Monitoring the activity, health and status of such operations has come to be known by a variety of names, one of which is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Practically speaking, the goal in these systems is to provide event-driven situational awareness, where the current state of the operation and supporting systems is visible at any instant.

Observing activity in these systems in real-time is much like monitoring and controlling a manufacturing facility. In both, there is a need for real-time data acquisition, analysis of that data, and presentation in a variety of forms. Yet, some characteristics of these functions are very different from the earlier systems.