Overview
In Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), a business transaction defines the structure of a logical unit of work you want to track. It acts as the template that describes what a piece of work looks like — what stages it passes through, what data identifies it, and how instances of that work are recognised from your data sources.
In the Pull Model, business transactions are defined by queries against external data sources — Azure Application Insights, Log Analytics workspaces, or Azure Data Explorer (ADX). Rather than receiving events sent by your integration solution, BAM queries these sources on a schedule and uses the results to identify and track transaction activity.
Business value
Defining business transactions in the Pull Model lets you bring visibility to integration workflows that already exist — without modifying them. You gain structured, business-level tracking of work that your solutions are already performing, surfaced in a consistent format alongside other monitored processes in Turbo360.
How it works
A business transaction in the Pull Model is a configuration object that tells BAM:
- Which data source to query (App Insights, Log Analytics, or ADX)
- What query to run against that source
- How to map query result fields to tracked properties and stage definitions
- How to correlate results into transaction instances over time
When BAM executes the scheduled query for a transaction, it evaluates the results against the transaction configuration and creates or updates transaction instances accordingly. Each unique result — identified by a configured correlation property — becomes a separate transaction instance.
The Pull Model uses the App Insights, Log Analytics, or ADX transaction type, depending on the configured data source. This distinguishes Pull Model transactions from Push Model transactions, which use the Custom Logging type.
A few things to keep in mind:
- A business transaction is the definition, not the data. The data lives in your App Insights workspace, Log Analytics workspace, or ADX cluster; BAM reads it on a schedule.
- One business transaction can have multiple stages, each mapped to a different query or result condition.
- Each business transaction belongs to a business process, which groups related transactions for monitoring and alerting purposes.
- Pull Model transactions are read-only with respect to your source data — BAM never writes to App Insights, Log Analytics, or ADX.