Business process monitoring with PRTG

Business process monitoring (BPM) is the practice of tracking, analyzing, and managing the performance of business processes to ensure they run efficiently and effectively. It involves the continuous observation of key process metrics and performance indicators to detect issues, bottlenecks, or deviations from the expected workflow.

Key aspects of business process monitoring include:

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Specific metrics tracked to measure the success of a business process (for example order fulfillment time, error rate, or customer satisfaction).
• Real-time alerts: Automated notifications when a process deviates from set thresholds or targets.
• Data analytics: Analyzing collected data to identify trends, inefficiencies, or opportunities for improvement.
• Visualization tools: Dashboards or reports that provide an overview of process performance.

Ensuring process compliance

Monitoring helps ensure that your processes adhere to internal standards, industry regulations, and legal requirements. This is critical for industries with strict compliance needs (for example finance, healthcare) to avoid penalties or reputational damage.

Enhancing customer satisfaction

Efficient and well-monitored processes lead to faster, more reliable service or product delivery. By detecting delays or quality issues early, you can ensure timely resolution, leading to improved customer experiences and satisfaction.

Real-time issue detection and troubleshooting

Process monitoring allows for the real-time identification of errors, failures, or deviations. Immediate alerts help you respond quickly, minimizing the impact of problems on operations and customer service.

Data-driven decision making

Monitoring provides valuable data about how your processes perform. This data gives management insights into areas needing improvement, investment, or restructuring. Data-driven decisions lead to more effective strategies and improvements.

Optimizing resource allocation

By monitoring resource usage (time, personnel, equipment, etc.), you can ensure that resources are allocated efficiently, avoiding overuse or underuse in certain areas and improving overall productivity.

“Business process management” refers to the workflows that are related to the identification, design, documentation, implementation, control, and subsequent optimization of business processes. Not only technical issues are examined but also organizational and strategic issues, for example. The word "process" simply refers to a recurring sequence of associated activities, that is, work steps that are always carried out in the same order.

“Business process monitoring”, on the other hand, is the task of reviewing and analyzing the execution of such processes to identify their successes and potential problems. Monitoring thus becomes an integral part of the business process management lifecycle and is usually performed using dedicated business process monitoring tools.

In PRTG, “sensors” are the basic monitoring elements. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, for example the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, or the free space on a disk drive.

On average, you need about 5-10 sensors per device or one sensor per switch port.