What is Azure Business Process Tracking?
Per Microsoft, Azure Business Process Tracking is aimed at developers and business analysts who integrate solutions across multiple Azure resources and want to make the relationship between technical components and the real-world business scenario visible. A business process is a series of stages that represent the tasks flowing through a real-world business scenario, for example resolving a customer ticket for a power outage across multiple Standard Logic Apps workflows.
The service decouples business process design from the technical implementation: no tracking code needs to be embedded in code, resources, or the solution itself. Instead, the mapping between the transaction ID, business properties, and the actual workflow operations is defined through the process editor in the Azure portal.
Core Features
- Stage-based process design: Business processes are defined in the Azure portal as a series of stages representing the real-world business flow.
- Transaction ID for correlation: A single transaction ID, such as an order, case, or ticket number, identifies a transaction across all process stages and allows correlating them.
- Mapping to Standard Logic Apps workflows: A read-only workflow designer maps the transaction ID and business properties to specific operations and their outputs in a Standard Logic Apps workflow.
- Storage in Azure Data Explorer: Captured transactions and business properties are stored in a linked Azure Data Explorer cluster and can be evaluated there.
- CI/CD support: Deployed business processes support continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines, so stages and mappings don’t need to be rebuilt for each environment.
Typical Use Cases
Business context for integration solutions: Teams running integration solutions across multiple Azure resources visualize the relationship between technical components and the real-world business process, such as resolving a customer ticket.
Transaction tracking across multiple workflows: A transaction that flows through several Standard Logic Apps workflows can be traced across all stages using its transaction ID.
Reporting on business metrics: Business properties captured from workflow operations are available in Azure Data Explorer for later evaluation and reporting.
Rollout across multiple environments: CI/CD pipelines allow rolling out business processes consistently across development, test, and production environments.
Benefits
- Decouples business process design from the technical implementation without embedded tracking code
- Traceability of transactions across multiple workflow stages using a single transaction ID
- Reusability of the process definition across CI/CD pipelines
- No additional charge for the tracking service itself at this time per Microsoft (charges apply only for the Azure Data Explorer cluster used)
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory helps you introduce Azure Business Process Tracking for your Standard Logic Apps integrations, size the required Azure Data Explorer cluster, and account for current limitations such as the lack of support for stateless workflows.
Contact us for a no-obligation consultation on Azure Business Process Tracking.
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Azure Business Process Tracking?
Azure Business Process Tracking lets you model a business process as a series of stages that represent real-world business scenarios, and map those stages to the underlying Azure resources in an integration solution. This adds business context to technical resources without embedding tracking code in the implementation.
What limitations currently apply?
Per Microsoft's documentation, business process design, tracking, and deployment are currently available only in the Azure portal, and no capability exists to export or import tracking profiles. Only Standard logic app resources with stateful workflows are supported; stateless workflows are currently not supported.
Why is an Azure Data Explorer cluster required?
When you create a business process, you must specify an existing or new Azure Data Explorer cluster, database, and table. The business process uses this database to store transactions and the captured business property values for later evaluation.
How much does Azure Business Process Tracking cost?
Per Microsoft, Azure Business Process Tracking itself does not incur charges at this time. However, because every business process requires an Azure Data Explorer cluster, database, and table, Azure Data Explorer charges apply based on the selected pricing option.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Azure (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Azure.
