Overview
A business process represents a business workflow modeled in Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) using the Pull Model (Data Queries). It groups a set of related business transactions that together describe an end-to-end operation — such as order fulfillment, invoice processing, or employee onboarding. Each business process belongs to a business process group and is tracked by querying existing data sources in your Azure environment.
Each business process contains one or more transactions, and each transaction contains one or more stages. BAM retrieves data from your configured data sources on a recurring schedule, giving you visibility into how your workflow is progressing without requiring any instrumentation of your integration components.
Business value
Business processes let you map your Azure integration workflows to recognizable business concepts. Instead of querying individual data sources in isolation, you can monitor the entire end-to-end flow as a single unit — reducing mean time to detect failures, improving visibility for non-technical stakeholders, and enabling query-based alerting aligned to business outcomes. Because the Pull Model queries data that already exists in App Insights, ADX, or Log Analytics, no changes to your integration solution are required.
How it works
A business process is the top-level container in the BAM Pull Model data model. Its structure is:
- Business process — the named workflow (e.g. "Order fulfillment")
- Transactions — the discrete operations within that workflow (e.g. "Order received", "Payment processed")
- Stages — the checkpoints within each transaction, each backed by a query against a data source
BAM uses the display name to identify a business process in the Turbo360 interface. Each transaction is associated with a data source — an App Insights workspace, an ADX cluster, or a Log Analytics workspace — and a KQL query that returns the tracked records.
The Pull Model retrieves data by running queries on a schedule. Unlike the Push Model, there is no BAM API to call from your integration components — BAM reads data directly from your existing Azure monitoring infrastructure.
A data source is an App Insights workspace, ADX cluster, or Log Analytics workspace connected to the Pull Model environment. A transaction defines the query and stage mapping that tells BAM how to retrieve and interpret the workflow data from that source.
Example scenario
A finance team processes supplier invoices through a Logic App workflow. Their existing App Insights workspace captures telemetry at each step. The end-to-end flow is modeled as a single Pull Model business process in Turbo360:
- Business process: Invoice processing
- Business process group: Finance operations
The process contains three transactions, each backed by an App Insights query:
| Transaction | Data source | What it represents |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice received | App Insights | Tracks when a new invoice payload arrives and is logged by the Logic App trigger |
| Validation result | App Insights | Tracks the outcome of schema and business-rule validation |
| Payment dispatched | App Insights | Tracks when the payment instruction is successfully sent to the payment gateway |
Each transaction contains stages that correspond to the telemetry events already being captured. BAM runs the configured KQL queries on a schedule and maps the results to the transaction and stage structure defined in the business process.
In Turbo360, the entire flow appears as a single business process. You can query any transaction instance by invoice ID, inspect which stage last returned data, and configure query-based monitoring alerts — without modifying the underlying Logic App or querying App Insights directly.