As the concept of observability continues to gain traction, enterprise monitoring systems are gradually transitioning from traditional centralized monitoring to comprehensive observability frameworks. The three pillars of observability—metrics, logs, and traces—have become deeply ingrained across the industry. This shift in mindset has driven the evolution of use cases and corresponding product demands: after building robust observation systems for basic resources, logs, and system microservices through various tools, business-level observability has also risen to the top of the enterprise agenda. Breaking through the barriers between basic resources and systems to achieve true operational telemetry visualization in real-world business scenarios is one of the most important aspirations within every enterprise. Against this backdrop, and in response to market and industry demands, CanWay BlueWhale has conducted in-depth research into actual enterprise scenarios and launched the KBOM product—a dedicated business operations observation module within the CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center.
01 Observability Scenarios
Whether in financial enterprises such as banks and securities firms, or in manufacturing sectors such as energy and transportation, business operations are always the most critical lifeline of an enterprise. A wide variety of complex business scenarios sustain an enterprise's continued existence, making runtime observation of business systems a top priority. Business observability capabilities can generally be divided into two major categories: operational call chains and business metrics.
Operational call chains represent the invocation dependencies between business systems. A failure at any point in the chain could become a critical factor constraining smooth business operations.
Business metrics intuitively reflect the health of business operations. Universal golden metrics—such as request volume, response time, and response rate—can effectively capture business runtime conditions across various scenarios.
02 Scenario Pain Points
Driven by Cloud-Native principles, as IT resources increasingly shift toward containerized and cloud platform architectures, business architectures are also progressively adopting microservices. This transformation has made real-time scenarios more complex and volatile. Accordingly, the challenges facing IT O&M personnel have become increasingly unpredictable, and enterprises commonly encounter the following pain points:
Traditional monitoring approaches that rely on designing individual metrics, configuring thresholds, and issuing passive alerts can no longer respond to business failures in a timely manner, nor can they effectively anticipate business operational risks.
Common APM solutions are unable to address the challenge of cross-system call tracing in scenarios involving system isolation
The core principle of observability lies in shifting from passive monitoring to proactive observation. Traditional monitoring tools fall short of meeting the IT O&M need for proactive exploration and hidden risk identification.
03 Solution
For real-world business scenarios within enterprises, the KBOM module enables topology visualization of business architectures and view-based presentation of metric data. Through formatted log data conforming to common protocols or cross-system trace data, it achieves automatic detection and generation of business flows. Combined with powerful data cleansing and analysis capabilities, it performs cleansing and analysis of various business metrics, ultimately presenting the results through intuitive visual views—delivering true full-stack observability at the business level.
04 Product Features
Feature 1: Business Dashboard
The Full-Stack Observability Center's Business Monitoring module (hereinafter referred to as "Business Monitoring") leverages data analysis capabilities to present golden business metrics from a business perspective, with support for reflecting alert statuses through color-coded metric bars. This enables users to intuitively review key indicators and alert conditions for their business systems.
Feature 2: System Dashboard
From an alternative perspective, Business Monitoring supports independent display of golden business metrics for each system, with color-coded metric bars reflecting alert statuses. This enables users to independently observe critical systems, functioning as a focused application monitoring tool that helps identify business operational risks in a timely manner.
Feature 3: Business Topology
Business Monitoring can automatically detect and generate the actual invocation dependency topology of business operations through aggregated analysis of formatted data. Through the topology view, users can directly perceive the actual flow of business requests without having to manually explore and comprehend the vast and complex overall system architecture. Meanwhile, the topology supports direct visualization of each node's operational health status. Through color-coded markers, users can immediately focus on bottleneck or faulty nodes, enabling rapid and convenient business debugging and fault troubleshooting.
Feature 4: Business Details
Users can drill down from the Business Dashboard or Business Topology to view the detailed operational status of a specific business.
1. Scenario Topology
Consistent with the topology page, users can view the actual operational dependencies within the topology area, with support for expanding nodes to view aggregated metric data for each system within the current business scenario.
2. Metric View
Consistent with the Business Dashboard page, users can view metric data for any time period. Golden metrics are displayed centrally with color-coded processing based on alert conditions. Users can click on a color-coded view to navigate directly to the alert list page to review corresponding alert details.
3. Interface List
This consolidates the specific interfaces traversed by a business scenario, enabling metric data analysis at the interface level. Users can search for corresponding data by interface name or associated system. Aggregated data is also provided, allowing users to view summary metric data after slicing and searching across any dimension.
Feature 5: System Details
1. System Topology
By integrating with the APM system, the module retrieves application runtime topology to display system-level operational dependencies and invocations, providing comprehensive infrastructure monitoring visibility into the underlying service architecture.
2. Metric View
Through a golden metrics summary view, system operational status is displayed. Users can navigate to the alert list page with a single click on a color-coded node to review corresponding alert details, enabling streamlined alert management workflows. A business request pie chart is also displayed, allowing observation of the actual proportion of each business invocation from the system perspective.
3. Interface List
This consolidates the interface information for services exposed by the system, enabling system operational status monitoring at the interface level. Users can perform multi-dimensional slicing and searching based on interface, associated system, and other attributes.
Feature 6: Request Chain Search
Every individual business request is recorded in detail: system invocation waterfall charts are rendered; real-time data is aggregated through line charts based on actual request volumes. Users can freely combine and slice data across multiple dimensions—including global tracking ID, system call trace markers, originating system, traversed systems, and response time—to observe and explore business operations from various angles, enabling deep log analysis of request-level behavior.
Feature 7: Observability Integration
Thanks to the CanWay BlueWhale integrated observability platform philosophy, the Business Monitoring module supports rapid cross-scenario navigation and drill-down:
Navigate to the alert list/detail page through alert color-coding and alert summaries;
Drill down to analyze raw log data through topology nodes;
Jump directly to the corresponding APM application analysis from the system details page with a single click;
Drill down from specific request chain segments to Trace data analysis.
05 Implementation Vision
Business Monitoring aims to minimize system modification requirements for users, adopt broader technical approaches, and lower the cost of building business observability within enterprises—providing a highly applicable and user-friendly business scenario observability solution for a wide range of enterprise types.
