Book excerpt: Business activity monitoring, or BAM, provides real-time business intelligence by capturing data as it flows through a business system. By using BAM, you can monitor a business process in real time and generate alerts when the process needs human intervention. Pro Business Activity Monitoring in BizTalk 2009 focuses on Microsoft's BAM tools, which provide a flexible infrastructure that captures data from Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, .NET applications, and BizTalk Server. This book shows why BAM is an important component of any business intelligence strategy because it bridges the gap between business intelligence and business process management. Part One of the book covers the basics of BAM. It teaches you how to install BAM, and then it leads you through a complete but simple project to capture data from a WCF service Part Two of the book describes the BAM tool set. It shows you how to define the data that is captured by BAM, wire up a BizTalk application for BAM, and view BAM data using the BAM Portal Part Three of the book focuses on monitoring applications written in WCF or WF. It also shows you how to use the BAM API Part Four of the book covers advanced topics in BAM. These topics include integrating BAM with Microsoft's BI stack, creating relationships between BAM activities, managing BAM servers, and monitoring BizTalk applications using BAM This book contains numerous exercises to help you learn BAM. Source code for the samples is available from Apress.com. For many CIOs, business intelligence is at the top of their priority lists. Learn why with Pro Business Activity Monitoring in BizTalk 2009.