An enterprise application provides activities, processes, workflows, and services to achieve a designated business function: technical managers analyze the workload and operational managers check the health of the application in production.  But, what and who takes care of the business value and targets associated with the application?

In almost all cases, applications business health is monitored and alerted on a periodic basis (daily, monthly, annually, etc.). Any anomalies are reviewed manually and adjustments made, awaiting the next evaluation period to report if successful or not. Would it not be better to have the application itself monitor its own business health, with attributes and targets set by business folks, and for the application to self-adjust or self-heal in real time, in the case of changed performance or degraded service  level against these business thresholds?

This is the prime goal of sense, to continually monitor the business health of  services, processes, applications or resources, to make real-time evaluations and decisions, and to take appropriate actions to keep the performance and service quality at the correct level(s) to achieve the business targets; with no manual intervention required.

In sense we define an aggregation of Business SLAs to be balanced amongst themselves to most efficiently achieve the desired business result; this aggregation of sense assets is called an experience. An experience assimilates Business SLAs, SLAs, emotions, to evaluate and determine the best set of services, feelings, and bizflows, to use to achieve the business objective, according to its SLA. Typically an experience is associated with a non-trivial business activity of some value, it could be a single critical step in the business function, or it could be a long and complex set of tasks and activities to be carried out; the business importance is defined by the business owners.

This evaluation, decision and operation requires no knowledge on the part of the requester – development staff can concentrate on the functionality of the application or service, not on how the service components must perform to reach a stated business goal. This is a different scenario than normal technical SLA computing (sometimes found in governance and BPM solutions), where a group of components run within a business domain that must also comply with formal business agreements. Thus if two domains are declared of the same behavior, in sense‘s terms expressed as the same experience family, sense will balance the load to the most performant experience. When the performance of the balanced domain is similar across the other experiences in the family, sense starts to balance incoming requests using a round robin approach.

A user session is preserved when computing in a domain, and all such calls are bound to that specific domain until the business case has finished. In this way user calls are redirected to the most experienced service by leaving calls as soon as they are complete.

An experience is a package of sense assets (emotions, cache, feelings, services, bizflows, etc.) with a family name and a Business SLA to guide sense in determining which is the most performant experience in the cloud.

A Business SLA is described and computed while packaging components into an experience and is used to model the health of these components against their business criteria. In this way sense can be instructed to monitor real-time and to balance which experience is most profitable to use for new requests. This enables the business to:

• describe one or more business scenarios that satisfy a single business outcome – provide more than on way to achieve the business goal;
• gain the most value from the experiences configured in the system;
• reduce the use of loss leading services in favor of high return services - sense knows which services, or experiences, produce the highest (and lowest) return
• monitor real-time the profit and loss of the business transaction and adjust accordingly.