OpenSpan Events

Why People Metrics Are Important

OpenSpan's ability to track people metrics, which concern the often hidden costs associated with tasks carried out by knowledge workers on the corporate desktop, has been described by our customers as a "next-generation time and motion study." Our user process monitoring software, OpenSpan Events, gives you unprecedented visibility into how your users interact with software applications, or perform processes that span multiple applications.

OpenSpan Event Monitoring

With OpenSpan Events, any application or set of applications on a user's desktop‚ including Windows, Web, Java, mainframe, cloud-based, virtualized or Citrix-hosted applications‚ can be quickly and easily instrumented to generate events, without modifying the original application or accessing APIs. These events can be sent in real-time to BPM, BAM or CEP software or can be stored in a database for later analysis.

Product Components

OpenSpan Events

OpenSpan Events is a lightweight desktop runtime that passively and securely collects desktop events. By capturing information about user activity, OpenSpan Events provides unprecedented visibility into how your users interact with individual software applications, and how they perform processes that span multiple applications.

OpenSpan Events Collection Service

OpenSpan Events Collection Service collects user events in real-time via one of several supported messaging or http protocols, then transforms and loads the data into a customer-supplied database (SQL Server or Oracle) and/or publishes the events to 3rd-party BAM, CEP, BPM or custom-built subscribers. Depending upon the physical environment, event volumes and availability requirements, one or more Collection Servers are typically deployed.

OpenSpan Studio

OpenSpan Studio, the visual development environment, is used to define and deploy event collection to user desktops in a rapid and secure fashion.

How OpenSpan Events Works

OpenSpan Events monitors any application running on a user’s desktop and can generate real-time compliance alerts and notifications as well as detailed user and process performance data that can be fed into leading complex event processing (CEP), business intelligence (BI), business activity monitoring (BAM) or business process management (BPMS) solutions.

OpenSpan can monitor simple "clickstream" events, which include user activities such as:

• navigating to a specific URL,
• tabbing to a particular field,
• entering data, and
• copying or pasting information.

OpenSpan can also track more complex, custom events, such as:

• aggregated events that span multiple applications,
• events triggered based on KPIs, or
• conditional events specific to the business activity being performed (such as high value customer alert, or potential fraud pattern alert).

These events can then be:

• sent in real time to a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) or Complex Events Processing (CEP) engine,
• used to trigger Business Process Management (BPM) tasks, or
• stored in a database as an audit trail which can then be used for compliance purposes or analyzed with any major BI tool for process improvement opportunities.

Providing this user event data to your BAM and CEP engine will give you better real-time detection of patterns that indicate business threats, allowing you to minimize your fraud and compliance risks. This increased visibility also enhances your ability to identify opportunities and address them in real-time.

Real-time or offline analysis can also indicate areas where OpenSpan's automation capabilities can be used to create process improvements under the control of BPM software, such as:

• enforcing specific workflows,
• adding real-time process guidance,
• dynamically applying business logic based on rules engine or BAM state,
• preventing compliance exceptions, or
• disabling certain fields or functionality.

In this way, OpenSpan effectively extends the monitoring capabilities of BAM and the orchestration and governance principles of BPM to the micro-flows associated with user processes that are currently unmonitored and unmanaged.

Supported Environments

Desktop Environments: Windows (2000, 2003, XP, and Windows 7), Vista, Citrix, VMware

Databases: Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and other ODBC and SQL databases (Includes a well-documented extensible data model)

BPMS & BAM: IBM, Oracle, Pegasystems, Progress, SAP, Software AG, TIBCO and other leading suites

Business Intelligence: TIBCO Spotfire, IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Oracle Hyperion, Microsoft Analytics, Software AG ARIS MashZone, Pentaho and other leading platforms

Enterprise Applications: OpenSpan provides a rich set of application adapters including SAP, Oracle, Remedy, Clarify, MS Office, IBM Lotus, salesforce.com and others

Other: Messaging platforms (TIBCO EMS, JMS, MS-MQ, IBM-MQ) and web services components

Click here to learn about Key Uses for OpenSpan Events.