
[[ga-bsm-introduction]]
= Business Service Monitoring
:description: How to monitor high-level business service contexts with {page-component-title} to identify the most critical problems affecting them.

While {page-component-title} detects issues in your network by device, interface, or service, Business Service Monitoring takes it one step further.
With this feature, you can monitor high-level business service contexts around {page-component-title}'s technical service monitors, and quickly identify the most critical problems affecting them.

A business service operational status is calculated to indicate which business services are affected by events at the technical service monitors level.
For example, assume a company runs an online store.
Customers can log in, select items for purchase, add them to their cart, and check out using a payment system.
The whole service is provided by a few web servers and access data from databases.
A SQL service monitor is configured on each database server to monitor its status, and an HTTP service monitor tests each of the web servers.
A page sequence monitor tests the store's login, shop, and payment workflows using the provided web portal.

As an example, let's assume a company runs an online store.
Customers log in, select items, place them in the shopping cart and checkout using a payment system.
The whole service is provided by a few web servers and access data from databases.
To monitor the status of the databases, a SQL service monitor on each database server is configured.
For testing the web servers a HTTP service monitor is used for each of them.
Covering the overall functionality, a Page Sequence Monitor tests the login, shop, and payment workflow through the provided web portal.

A possible representation of the shop's system hierarchy is shown below:

image::bsm/01_bsm-example-scenario.png["Example system hierarchy diagram showing relationships among users, workflows, and systems"]
